All fraud victims of this Ponzi scheme, "regulated" in Luxembourg - #adirtyfund |
![]() The €100 million vanishing act! Click here to read the article.. |
From various General Meetings, Minutes, shareholder letters and social media discussions, a summary of the shareholder base is as follows :- the US$ 55 million Columna Commodities fund has almost 200 shareholders across different currency classes, US$, €, GBP, CHF, and SEK.
Institutional Shareholders - Swedbank AB
Why does Swedbank get a special mention here? Well bizarrely, the directors of Columna created a share class in Swedish Krone for Stefan Gustafsson, but failed to capital weight it. So any investor in the SEK class would get 10 times the voting shares per in the other classes - this meant that Swedbank, with it's own private label fund being offered to its clients, became the biggest shareholder in Columna (47%), and the sole biggest shareholder in all the LFP I funds combined. Swedbank's Luxembourg operation voted in the investigating director David Mapley in September 2018, but shortly thereafter Swedbank closed its Luxembourg operations due to the embarassing losses of its clients in Columna. Any positive collaboration from before went out of the window when Luxembourg lawyers were appointed to remotely represent Swedbank, Sweden in Luxembourg. At the shareholder AGM in November 2020 Swedbank did nothing to prevent the voting fraudsters across various LFP I funds to oust the investigating directors..
Institutional Shareholders - Life Companies
Old Mutual (over 100 shareholder positions), SEB Life, these life companies managed investors' pension monies and retirement savings, and issued "life-wrapper" bonds to investors against shareholdings in Columna. They never voted! So a defrauded investor basically had no way to represent his/her anger at general meetings of shareholders, or ask the piercing questions - however, the investigating director Mapley worked with a lot of shareholders, and helped provide some transparency re. the previous murky dealings!
Institutional Shareholders - Nominee Companies
Euroclear, Clearstream, Citibank, Capital International, these nominees other than Capital rarely pass on shareholder notices, and more importantly, never vote on behalf of shareholders. Net result, jut a few active shareholders can decide the course of action for the whole fund.
Individuals
Investors from Europe, Middle East, Asia tended to punch very much above their weight, as their name was directly on the share register, and their participation was easiest to organise for general meetings. Various small sharehlder groups became very active, and extremely helpful in providing som emissing documentation to the investigating director when Alter Domus refused to give up past Columna documentation to the investigating director.