Bounty Hunter Tracks Chinese Companies That Dupe Investors
Mr. Seiden and team, start here (and PM me if you want a trove of details).
http://www.huozhan.com/LogonAction_welcome.do?index=index
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/business/dealbook/bounty-hunter-tracks-chinese-companies-that-dupe-investors.html?hpw&rref=business&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0
Bounty Hunter Tracks Chinese Companies That Dupe Investors
Robert W. Seiden is a Wall Street bounty hunter. He tracks down executives of Chinese companies that listed on stock exchanges in the United States and then blew up.
It is a painstaking business that few are willing to do.
One of his current targets is the chairman at Sino Clean Energy, who has battled with investors in a Nevada state court since 2014. On Feb. 16, the trial judge found the executive, Ren Baowen, in criminal contempt and ordered his arrest for failing to comply with earlier court orders.
In an attempt to increase the pressure on Mr. Ren, Mr. Seiden, the court-appointed receiver for Sino Clean, prepared a notice about the arrest warrant to be published through PR Newswire, which distributes corporate news releases.
The release was published on Feb. 29 — but not in China, where Mr. Ren lives. PRNewswire, in an email to Mr. Seiden, said it had refused to publish the notice there citing “heightened political sensitivity concerning Chinese investment interests.”
It was not the first time Mr. Seiden’s tactics have been thwarted. It is the reason many remain skeptical of his efforts. Nevertheless, he has embraced the challenge and become the go-to person for American investors who are suing Chinese companies saying that they were swindled.
“Unless the Chinese government is coming to arrest me, I’m going to do whatever is legally permissible by court order,” Mr. Seiden said in a recent interview.
Mr. Seiden, 52, a former Manhattan prosecutor, has been appointed by judges as the receiver to oversee the management of nine Chinese companies — many incorporated in Nevada — that once traded shares in the United States.
But his actual dollar recoveries for investors have been small — just $8 million out of the nearly $90 million he has sought to recoup.
A Sherlock Holmes enthusiast (a bust of the fictional detective sits on his desk in Manhattan), Mr. Seiden has built a reputation for being tenacious. And for good reason: Getting Chinese executives to pay up involves extensive meetings, negotiations and cooperation from Chinese authorities and bankers.
He is not just focused on China. He employs former agents from intelligence agencies around the world, including the Mossad in Israel and the K.G.B. in Russia, to help him conduct cloak-and-dagger investigations in places like Russia, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.
He opened his company, Confidential Global Investigation, in 2008. Early on, he did work for hedge funds and their investors. But one of his first jobs in China was for Richemont, the company that owns luxury brands like Cartier, Piaget and Jaeger-LeCoultre. Mr. Seiden tracked down a ring of counterfeiters operating from Latvia and Scotland and manufacturing fake watches in China.
In 2013, Mr. Seiden received a call from a lawyer representing a large investor in ZST Digital Networks, a Chinese equipment maker. A Delaware judge appointed Mr. Seiden as the company’s receiver to enforce the terms of a $32 million judgment on behalf of the investor. Mr. Seiden is still trying to get that money back, but the assignment started him on a new career path.
More work started to flow from investor lawsuits over reverse mergers. In those deals, Chinese companies looking to trade in the United States bypassed the traditional method of an initial public offering and instead merged with largely defunct companies that already had shares listed on an exchange in the United States.
Starting in the mid-2000s, these companies drew a wave of interest from investors who thought they could get rich from China’s surging economic growth. But years later, they had little but burned fingers to show for their investments.
Many of the Chinese companies were soon engulfed in accounting irregularities or allegations of outright fraud. Others simply stopped submitting quarterly financial statements in the United States, leaving investors in the dark about what was happening with their operations in China.
Critics say regulators have been slow to act.
“The U.S. regulators have been unwilling to go to the mat on this,” said Paul Gillis, an accounting professor at Guanghua School of Management, Peking University in Beijing.
At the same time, there has been little political will to do anything about in China. “The responsibility for this stuff is spread out too widely, there are so many different Chinese bureaucracies involved,” Professor Gillis said.
But recently, Mr. Seiden has enlisted some officials in China. With the help of China’s Ministry of Finance and Commerce and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, Mr. Seiden collected $4 million from a settlement with Shengtai Pharmaceutical in 2015.
Mr. Seiden said that he expected to collect an additional $28 million within months as a result of current negotiations, including talks with Mr. Ren’s legal team.
In the case of Sino Clean Energy, a clean coal manufacturing company, Mr. Seiden contends in court filings that Mr. Ren “stole millions of dollars” from investors in the United States by “going dark.”
The company, based in Xi’an, China, has not filed updated financial statements with the Securities and Exchange Commission since early 2012, according to the investor lawsuit.
Sino Clean Energy listed its shares on the Nasdaq stock market after a reverse merger in 2006 with a largely defunct company called Endo Networks. It then raised more than $26 million in the United States.
Matthew C. Zirzow, the Las Vegas bankruptcy lawyer for Sino Clean, did not return a telephone call seeking comment. Another lawyer for Mr. Ren could not reached for comment.
Investors in companies that Mr. Seiden is pursuing to recover money acknowledge that the efforts are long shots.
John J. Kassay Jr. of Parksville, N.Y., said he lost about $20,000 on his investment in Sino Clean and joined the lawsuit in Nevada against Mr. Ren and the company to “take them to task.”
Whatever money he gets back from the litigation will be worth it, he said.
Michael Sammons, a San Antonio investor who lost money in two Chinese companies, Weikang Bio-Technology Group and RINO International, said he could not find anyone other than Mr. Seiden to take on these cases.
“He is pretty much the only game in town,” said Mr. Sammons, who said he first learned of Mr. Seiden’s name from an article three years ago in The Wall Street Journal.
Mr. Seiden’s firm has grown from a handful of employees, including Steven, his brother, to 20 employees. Chinese reverse merger cases account for about 80 percent of the firm’s work.
“We are creating a pathway to get money back,” he said.
A recent crackdown on financial firms because of turmoil in the Chinese stock market has heightened concerns about how China treats foreign business interests when they conflict with its own.
A spokeswoman for PRNewswire said it did not publish the release in China because of new Chinese government restrictions on what foreign companies may publish online.
Yet while China can appear to be uncooperative with demands from outside investors, that attitude is changing as some Chinese leaders want to show that it can be a reliable business partner, Mr. Seiden argued.
Still, when he is in China — where he spends up to one month a year — he uses disposable phones and changes his hotel room after he checks in to make it more difficult for people to track his whereabouts, he said.
The investors he represents say they sense that change could be underway. At the very least, they figure his help cannot hurt.
“It’s a big battle, and it’s a big unknown because it has not been done before,” said Alain Peracca, a former Microsoft executive and an investor in Sino Clean Energy. “It is the only hope that shareholders have.”
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