Some hat-tips.

Roddy Boyd has been chasing a dodgy fund manager. Today he got his man: Bryan Caisse was arrested in Bogota Columbia. A lot of work went into that.  An excerpt is below:

Bryan Caisse, the former submarine weapons officer turned hedge fund manager, was arrested Saturday in Bogota, Colombia by officers from the Department of State’s Diplomatic Security Service.

His name should ring a bell for Southern Investigative Reporting Foundation readers: Caisse was the subject of a December report detailing how the once well-regarded mortgage-bond fund manager disappeared from New York in the autumn, leaving both a daughter and numerous investors from his fund behind and in the dark.

In October, a prosecutor with the New York County District Attorney’s Major Economic Crimes Bureau empaneled a grand jury to investigate a host of allegations surrounding Caisse’s nonpayment of a series of so-called working capital loans to his hedge fund, Huxley Capital Management. Specifically, the prosecutor was interested in unpaid loans from Caisse’s friends and family, many of whom had lent him money on the assurance that there was virtually no risk involved and that it would be repaid with interest in under a year. The Southern Investigative Reporting Foundation obtained documents showing Caisse avoided repaying several of these investors by creating email accounts for a pair of fictitious personal assistants who repeatedly assured the investors a wire transfer was forthcoming or an overnight mail delivery of a check was en route.

Manhattan District Attorney Vance unsealed the charges earlier today.

There is some satisfaction, albeit fleeting, in seeing fraudsters lose their liberty... 

Today Shawn Richard - the Astarra/Trio fraudster was released from prison. Shawn was the second person imprisoned following tip-offs from your correspondent. [Both original tips came from readers...] 

There is fine story - maybe too generous to the malefactors - on the Astarra/Trio scandal here.  An excerpt is below:

In 2008 and 2009, Tarrant, who had 220 clients including Telford, poured about $25 million into a seemingly lucrative hedge fund – the Astarra Strategic Fund. Managed by Trio Capital, which was run by Shawn Richard, Astarra was shown to be pumping out robust returns to investors, even during the global financial crisis. But the money invested by Ross Tarrant’s clients – along with tens of millions more from other investors – would disappear. None of that money would ever be found.

Tarrant, too, would be ruined. He lost half-a-million of his own money; his business, that once employed 70, shrank to 15; and he was banned from acting as a financial advisor – in part because he had also accepted, without disclosing them, more than $1 million in ‘marketing assistance’ payments from Trio Capital, manager of the Astarra Strategic Fund.

Shawn Richard was jailed for two-and-a-half years for his part in the losses. He is likely to be freed on Tuesday, January 21. Many expect him to flee Australia upon his release, but Telford had come to Cooma hoping to talk to Richard, in a final attempt to learn what had happened to his money. He didn’t succeed. A smirking prison guard informed Telford that despite his careful arrangements with prison authorities to visit Telford that Sunday morning, Richard had been let out to spend the day at a beach house with a friend, and there would be no meeting.

I pity the regulators. There are so many scams. So little time. And the satisfaction is so short-lived. The sadness of the people who have lost their life savings (as many Astarra/Trio victims did) is however long-lasting...