excerpt
However, Mario wanted to have a bigger
piece of the pie than his partners, so he made a side deal with a shady
promoter and the trustee released all the stock to the new purchaser
on Mario’s instructions alone, and without the deposit that was customary
in any financial deal. The promoter ended up running around
downtown Vancouver with a briefcase full of certificates that didn’t
belong to him, and after he wasted a few certs on some of the scummiest
people in VSE circles without being able to raise the funds to
pay for the shell company, he went back to Mario and together they
concocted a story that the certs had gotten lost.
One of the scumbags the promoter dealt with was Jimmy Hall, a
character Eteo had met once, who was probably the shadiest promoter
in Vancouver. Eteo remembered how this man had called him
son when they met like some kind of mafia don, and he had not been
too surprised when Hall was later gunned down for unknown reasons,
like another famously scummy Vancouver promoter, Bobby
Hanover, who was also killed a few years later.
When, after this debacle, the three partners met to discuss their
next move with Richard Walden, another investor on Robert’s side,
and coincidentally the current president of Golden Veins, Walden had
been furious and threatened to go to the authorities. Eteo had argued
for keeping VSE officials away from the issue and instead going after
the trustee who had “lost” the certs. Mario had vehemently objected,
not surprisingly, since he was the one who had instructed her to release
the stock to the promoter in the first place, though Eteo only
discovered this later. Walden had continued to insist they go to the
VSE and report their share certificates stolen and had almost persuaded
the others until Eteo asked, “What do you expect the VSE to
do? Issue new certs to us?”
Nobody knew what to say to this.
“Look,” Eteo explained, “there’s a way to get all our shares back,
though it will take time.”
“Okay, how?” Walden demanded.
“We declare the certs lost one at a time and issue a new cert each
time, but we can only do this gradually, one cert at a time.”
Manolis Aligizakis 