Colin Heatherington, a former resident of B.C., was arrested in connection with a $200-million international securities fraud investigation, appeared in court Thursday for a bail hearing in Vancouver.
Heatherington was arrested by the RCMP in Port Alberni under a provisional arrest warrant filed b the United States Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in a statement on Wednesday.
While Mrozek stated he doesn’t know if an official request for extradition has been made, it would be a separate process from the provisional arrest request. This case involves the co-operation and co-ordination with the U.S. State Department, and the Washington office of the U.S. Department of Justice.
In December 2015, a U.S. federal grand jury alleged in an 86-page document that throughout the 2000s Heatherington and others “perpetrated a multimillion-dollar fraud on investors in various hedge funds.”
The defendants caused the hedge funds to invest in penny stocks that were traded in the U.S. and elsewhere, and then manipulated the stocks to inflate or prop up prices to exaggerate the fund’s return. Ultimately this allowed the defendants to sell their own shares of these penny stocks at highly inflated prices.
Furthermore, the inflation overstated the performance of the hedge funds, allowing the defendants to claim substantial performances fees and other compensation. As a result of this scheme the victims of the hedge funds lost more than $200 million.
The initial arrest warrant was issued by the office in October of 2013, but at this point in time
Read the full story over at the Times Colonist.
