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Friday, June 26, 2020 10:46:41 AM
Stephen Taub
You had him listed on a few posts back this week from Brannex.
Fact: Does he seem like a good actor or bad actor Stephen Taub?
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He conspired with Vancouver crooks and securities offenders to cheat investors, both here and abroad. Among them were Summerland bank robber Luke Sommers; as well as Toronto stockbroker Stephen Taub and West Vancouver stock promoter Don Rutledge, both certified stock offenders./
Baines: Saxena guilty in massive fraud, jailed for 10 years
Rakesh Saxena, the former Thai bank official who holed up in Vancouver for 13 years while fighting extradition on embezzlement charges, has been sentenced to 10 years in jail in Thailand.
Saxena, 59, was found guilty on five counts of securities fraud between 1992 and 1995, having siphoned off tens of millions of dollars from the now defunct Bangkok Bank of Commerce, where he was employed as an adviser.
The scandal caused a run on bank deposits and led to the bank’s collapse, contributing to the devaluation of the baht and a regional crisis.
Saxena was arrested by RCMP in Whistler in 1996, but staved off extradition until October 2009, when the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear his last-ditch appeal, officially ending the longest extradition proceeding in Canadian history.
The Bangkok South Criminal Court was told how Saxena had set up 60 businesses in Thailand and used them to secure loans from the bank to cover debts and running costs, but instead channelled the money into personal accounts, mostly in Switzerland.
“The defendant clearly demonstrated his intention to take funds from the damaged party to invest for his own personal use, depositing the funds into several overseas accounts,” the judge said in reading the verdict.
Estimates of the money he stole from the bank vary from $60 million to $82 million. The court did not give a total.
Saxena, wearing orange prison fatigues and in a wheelchair, appeared frail and confused as the sentence was passed. He was also ordered to pay 1.13 billion baht ($35.8 million) in damages and a 1-million baht fine.
For 13 years and three months, Saxena fought extradition at every possible turn, costing Canadian taxpayers millions of dollars.
During most of this time, he lived in the relative luxury of house arrest — albeit at his own expense — first in a False Creek condo, and later in a more spacious house in Richmond’s Terra Nova area.
During this period, he wreaked havoc on the financial market, mainly by promoting essentially worthless stocks that trade on the U.S. over-the-counter markets.
He conspired with Vancouver crooks and securities offenders to cheat investors, both here and abroad. Among them were Summerland bank robber Luke Sommers; as well as Toronto stockbroker Stephen Taub and West Vancouver stock promoter Don Rutledge, both certified stock offenders.
He was the consummate tar baby: Almost everybody who came within his orbit — brokers, lawyers, politicians — seemed to be caught in his web of deception. Many sued for redress, many more were sued by Saxena, who used and abused our courts for his personal purposes. (Court records show he was a plaintiff or defendant in 36 different lawsuits filed in B.C.)
Police and securities regulators, for the most part, stood by and did nothing, trusting he would soon be extradited. He also had a lawyer-like ability to orchestrate deals to keep himself legally onside, even though he was morally offside. In 2005, after it became apparent that he had arranged for European boiler rooms to flog worthless stock, he insisted he was simply an intermediary and not a party to any of the contractual arrangements. “It’s a thin red line, I grant you, but it’s still a red line,” he told me.
He also managed to embarrass Canada internationally by plotting a military coup in Sierra Leone while in custody at the police lock-up at 222 Main Street.
After news of the planned coup leaked to the media, which forced him to cancel his plan, he cheekily told reporters there was nothing in the terms of his detention preventing him from plotting coups in foreign countries. The embarrassing part was that he was right.
His most remarkable characteristic was his patience and resilience. There are not many people who could spend so much time in a cage, albeit a gilded one, without any apparent distress.
Even on Friday, when it appeared that all was lost, he wasn’t about to give up.
“We have to appeal, of course,” he told reporters. “This sentence is absolutely wrong … Nobody in this country knows the financial laws. It’s the Bank of Thailand and the prosecutors who are to blame.”
dbaines@vancouversun.comWith files from Reuters
//Entertainment Purposes Only//
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