Almost one year on and somethings just won’t lie down and die - especially when the matter in question concerns missing assets to the tune of CAD 250 million allegedly in wallet lock-down.
The back story is well outlined above, so I won’t bore you with those details again here, but it is the developments since Cotten’s disappearance that interest me still.
In October 2019 it was reported that Jennifer Robertson, Cotten’s ‘widow’ as part of a voluntary settlement in Ontario was to return in the region of CAD 12 million in assets from his estate to the company. But that was far from enough to appease the ire of the company’s investors left out of pocket.
To mire the waters even further, Quadriga CX’s co-founder, Michael Patryn, is allegedly a convicted felon who has changed his name/identity at least twice and has also, significantly, spent 18 months in a US Federal prison for bank fraud.
Notably - not that Wikipedia is a reliable source of information but it can be a good starting point - if you look up Gerald Cotten’s name, his entry there states “…possibly died in December 2018…”; now that’s a first for me.
CAD 250 million is a lot of money to forget and the questions remained - was it a scam? Was it a Ponzi? Is Cotten even really dead?
Faking one’s own death for profit, or criminality, is not entirely unheard of. Names like John Stonehouse, Ken Kesey and John Darwin immediately spring to mind – I’ll let you look them up.
So it is somewhat inevitably that a group of investors (wallet users) have got together, engaged a top Canadian law firm (Miller Thomson), who have in turn taken the exceptional (but perfectly legal) step to formally request that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police make moves to exhume ‘Cotten’ to:
- a). Verify that if there is a body buried then the deceased is indeed him and
- b). What the cause of death actually was.
Meanwhile adding all little more fuel to the fire of rumours is the latest revelation that Argo Partners, a firm that specialises in purchasing distressed investments - others term them somewhat less politely as vulture investors - is currently interested in purchasing creditor claims in the QuadrigaCX case. So it seems that someone else believes there may still be money to be recovered here - watch this space!