The papers are full of the fact that after years of bashing the global warming scam as the fraud it is, greedy Nigel Farage has jumped on the bandwagon signing a new lucrative position with a business dealing in carbon credits and replanting of trees. Hypocrisy? Yes. But I can reveal it is far worse. Farage’s business partner has a history of deceiving investors.
I am amazed that Farage, one of whose other business venturers is a newsletter about financial transparency, has signed up with Selwyn Duijvestijn. Either Farage can’t be bothered with real financial research or he is just greedy. Or both.
On the Dutch Green Business Group website, new adviser N Farage, Selwyn is listed as the sole director and claims that he is “currently the youngest CEO of a public company”. Aged 31? Really? The truth is that he was in 2017 the youngest person to act as a CEO of an Amsterdam-listed company. Many others elsewhere in the world have been younger CEOs. But it is that company which he listed as CEO which should have set the alarm bells ringing for Farage and which should make anyone run a mile from Dutch Green.
The company was Inverko, listed as a cash shell. That is to say it had no operating assets. There is nothing illegal in this. But the major investor was a fund, MountainShield and indeed 13% of its portfolio was Inverko stock. The man behind that fund…. Selwyn Duijvestijn.
It gets worse, the shares in Inverko traded at 75 cents. But Selwyn’s fund was able to invest at just 20 cents so immediately he marked up the value of his holding by 275% which made the fund seem like a zinger so attracting new potential investors. Then Selwyn went on Dutch TV saying that the performance of the one-year-old fund (plus 22.94%) was due to various reasons: “The big hit is actually due to the volatility of markets. Trump has set the entire stock market and the entire economy in motion again and the fund is benefiting from these kinds of sharp moves.”
In fact, what largely caused that performance was Inverko where Selwyn’s fund owned 40.55% of the equity with a well known chat room share ramper owning another 45.17%. The free float was tiny meaning that the shares could move wildly to a multiple of asset value on almost no trades and it was thus Inverko that made Selywn look like a star rather than just another fund manager.
The Dutch regulator moved to force Selwyn’s firm to withdraw his misleading claims.
All of this behaviour is pretty shocking and begs the question of why on earth a penny share shyster who is happy to deceive investors wishes to sully his reputation by getting into business with Nigel Farage?