What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there a thing of which it is said,
“See, this is new”?
It has been already
in the ages before us.
Ecclesiastes 1:9-10
If there’s one lesson I repeatedly learn over the years – its that no matter the experience chances are good that other people have had it as well. This means there are other people with similar experiences, and that gives us something we can learn from and get an idea of what is yet to come.
Such is the case with the Concrete Equities scandal where the company sold investments in a property it never owned and used the funds to support other projects without bothering to tell the investors(1). In the days to come I’ll be discussing other aspects of the Concrete Equities scandal with a view to understanding what may happen next as the ABC District bankruptcy works its way through the regulatory and law enforcement process.
As a first step – here’s a timeline of the Concrete Equities proceedings from when they sold their investments to the declaration of bankruptcy to the chief executive being sentenced to six years in prison.
- 2006 – 2009: Concrete Equities sells ~$110M in investments
- 2009: Concrete Equities goes into receivership, RCMP receives a complaint from an investor
- Feb 2011: ASC holds a hearing to determine if investors were misled
- Sep 2011: ASC finds executives guilty of misconduct
- Jan 2012: ASC imposes record fines against Concrete Equities executives
- Apr 2013: Investors get some money back
- Jan 2014: RCMP lays charges
- Apr 2014: Concrete Equities investors start getting dividend checks
- Oct 2016: Varun Aurora sentenced to two years jail time, will do community service instead.
- Jan 2018: Concrete Equities executive David Humeniuk sentenced to six years in jail.
(1) This scandal was the basis of a prior article about the non-financial impact that fraud has on its investors.
ANO / Lutheran Watch 