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Italy brings charges against fake bank associate

Italian prosecutors charged five individuals with providing illegal financial services, including a London-based financial consultant whom OCCRP last week tied to the sham Spanish banking outfit Bandenia, which allegedly laundered money for criminal clients.

Massimiliano Arena and four others were charged in Sicily with being part of a transnational criminal group offering illegal financial services, a document seen by IrpiMedia confirms.

Italy’s La Stampa Libera reports that Guardia di Finanza in the northern Italian city of Messina had found two associates of Arena selling investments through a group of companies he ran that were not authorized to offer financial services in Italy.

Arena previously co-directed BBP Bandenia PLC, the main holding firm of the Bandenia banking group that was broken up in Spain in 2017 as part of a money laundering probe.

OCCRP and partners uncovered recently how people linked to the group have thrived since that Spanish clampdown, setting up at least 450 shell companies and widening their sphere of influence in a number of jurisdictions.

This has been achieved despite the fact that BBP Bandenia CEO Fabio Pastore is wanted by British authorities, and former CEO José Miguel Artiles Ceballos has been sentenced to four years in prison in Spain for money laundering. Ceballos denied all wrongdoing, and said he is appealing his sentence.

Fabrizio Pistorino, who was charged alongside Arena in the Italian investigation that concluded on April 5, is also linked to the Bandenia brand, having directed the UK-registered company Bandenia Ltd. with Artiles Ceballos, Pastore, Arena and others.

Arena previously told OCCRP that, while he had been a director of BBP Bandenia, he held “no executive and/or managerial position” and “never had access to any of the company’s information or documentation”.

Into the financial group that was targeted, the prosecutor Veronica De Toni implicated a company named Wealth Bank. IrpiMedia reported last week that Wealth Bank, like certain Bandenia-branded outfits, has boasted a banking license from the non-existent banking authority of Mwali, in Africa’s Comoros archipelago.

The Messina case claims Arena, Pistorino and the others are behind a corporate structure with holdings in the UK, the Czech Republic, Portugal and the Comoros, according to Italian authorities.

La Stampa Libera reported that the group attracted customers with opportunities to invest abroad, offering healthy returns, via the Jabardo international network.

However, the foreign companies involved were operating “off the books,” the firms taking the investors’ sums were not complying with local laws in their own jurisdictions, and the suspects were not permitted to promote such investments, Italian authorities say.

The probe had begun when a man from the northern town of Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto noticed, after his brother died, that the brother had been sending large sums of money abroad.

The investigation was carried out using phone intercepts and other techniques, La Stampa Libera reported. From Arena, a judge requested the seizure of 750,000 euros (US$827,000), with Pistorino told to hand over 700,000 euros ($771,000). But according to Italy’s Gazzetta del Sud, the money demanded could not be traced as the men are not in Italy.

Giancarlo Liberati, the lawyer representing Arena in the proceeding, told Italian media there was nothing illicit at play.

Separately, authorities in Spain announced in recent days that an investigation into alleged money laundering and due diligence failures by ING, Ibercaja, and CaixaBank in relation to Bandenia had been closed. A judge said he did not find wrongdoing by the three banks, which had been accused of failing to stop illicit funds from Bandenia clients passing through their books.

On Bandenia, the judge said there were no further indications of wrongdoing in the case involving the Spanish banks, but noted that the main case against Bandenia is ongoing.

That case accuses key companies in the Bandenia structure, as well as Artiles Ceballos and a number of his associates, of moving money for 253 clients, most of them criminals.

In an indictment for the case, a Spanish investigating judge called the Bandenia operation a perfect structure for money laundering that was “industrial” in scale. Among other scams, Bandenia is accused of using tools like fake lines of credit to offer criminal client’s pretexts to move money internationally.

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B.C. couple convicted of unlawfully confining quadriplegic man

A Surrey couple has been found guilty of unlawful confinement in the case of a quadriplegic man who sought to hire the woman for sex on New Year’s Day, 2018, but then changed his mind.

Justice Frits Verhoeven convicted common-law couple Jeremy Sean Eddy and Jacqueline Lee Peintinger of that crime in B.C. Supreme Court in New Westminster but found them not guilty of robbery, extortion, threatening and assault.

The court heard Peintinger was an escort advertising as “Nina” on a website and operating out of a coach house in the couple’s backyard. The victim, who name has not been disclosed, made arrangements to “utilize her services,” at $1,800 for 24 hours, agreeing to pay via PayPal. But there were problems with payment for lack of a WIFI signal.

The court heard the man, afflicted with cerebral palsy since birth and confined to a wheelchair, wanted a “date” for New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, specifically a sexual experience with two women and that Peintinger used a “special-purpose” bedroom in a converted detached garage in the backyard of the residence which she and her boyfriend rented.

When the victim arrived on New Year’s Eve, Eddy answered the door. The victim had not expected to see a man there. He testified Peintinger didn’t look like her website photos. There was also a second man there, named Vic. Uncomfortable, the victim changed his mind about the date and began to wheel away. He told the court Peintinger yelled, “Why are you running away” and told him “I passed up a lot of clients to be with you tonight.”

Fearful, he returned. Meanwhile, the other men were busy trying to construct a ramp so he could get into the bedroom with his wheelchair.

“As Mr. Eddy explained, the wheelchair was heavier than he and Vic expected,” Verhoeven noted. “The conditions were not ideal, as it was cold and snowy out. The board they were trying to use was slick.”

The other woman, Charlene or Char, arrived at the main house, where the two women socialized, leaving the victim alone.

“At this point, he had definitely decided that he did not want to proceed with the sexual encounter,” the judge noted. “However, he had not actually said this or that he wanted to leave, at this point.”

The victim decided to fake a seizure, hoping Peintinger and Eddy would call an ambulance. He rolled off the bed and hit the floor, injuring his lip and forehead. According to the victim, Peintinger asked him if he could make the PayPal transfer, he replied he couldn’t, she didn’t believe him, and became angry.

The victim was moved to the main house, where Charlene handed him a mobile phone and he made the PayPal transfer. The court heard Peintinger had not yet set up her side of the transaction, and therefore it was not yet complete. Once she did, the court heard, she accessed her newly created account eight times but was not able to confirm the $1,800 transfer.

Meantime, in the late afternoon of Jan. 1 the victim’s increasingly worried parents went to his apartment, checked his iPod, noted the 3 a.m. transaction and called their daughter, a police officer. She came to the apartment, saw the text messages and address, and called the Surrey RCMP.

An Emergency Response Team went to the couple’s house that night and arrested Eddy. Charlene died several days later of a drug overdose, the court heard.

“The plain fact is,” Verhoeven noted in his reasons for judgment, that the victim “was left largely unattended in the bedroom for many hours. The agreement was for a 24-hour ‘date,’ but, as he says, the date never really happened.”