Investigators with the New York office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided the offices of Benjamin Wey’s New York Global Group on 30 January, seizing documents and conducting interviews with employees, according to Roddy Boyd at The Financial Investigator.
According to one NYGG official, Wey’s Manhattan apartment was also raided. As of now, no charges have been filed and it was not clear what NYGG transactions were of interest to the FBI.
Attempts to contact NYGG and Wey were unsuccessful; a man answering the phone at the firm’s 40 Wall Street offices refused to give his name and would only reply, when questioned about the raid, “No one is here right now.” Follow-up calls were not answered. Jason Marshall, an official at Wey’s longtime publicists, said Wey and NYGG are no longer clients.
The raid was in many ways surprising in that legal repercussions from the collapse of the China reverse-merger boom had been minimal, save for some occasional de-listing activity from exchanges, TFI reports.
In a reverse takeover, shareholders of the private company purchase control of the public shell company and then merge it with the private company. The publicly traded corporation is called a “shell” since all that exists of the original company is its organizational structure. The private company shareholders receive a substantial majority of the shares of the public company and control of its board of directors. The transaction can be accomplished within weeks. If the shell is an SEC-registered company, the private company does not go through an expensive and time-consuming review with state and federal regulators because this process was completed beforehand with the public company.
ACQ Magazine more news…