Meyado / Meretec / MITL / Martin Young – A Cautionary Tale

One of the banes of one’s life as an expat is the frequent calls from often very persistent“Financial Advisers” who claim to be able to offer all sorts of ways of enhancing one’s wealth.Unfortunately, bitter experience has taught me that the only people’s wealth they tend to enhanceis their own – and the best example of this for me is the “Meyado Private Wealth Management Group“, a UK-based group who were active in Hong Kong in 2001 to 2003 and succeeded inextracting quite a bit of wealth from me before they wererun out of townby the Securities and Futures Commission. It is clear that I was far from alone in this, and there are various sites on theinternet where others have expressed their displeasure over the years with Meyado (there weremore, but apparently Meyado has resorted to legal action to get some taken down). The latestsuch attempt to get a critical mass of people together to go after Martin Young (the CEO andowner of Meyado) and his cronies has now appeared athttp://www.forespoke.comand I wish itevery success.Even if there is not much hope of getting any money back, at least such sites should help todissuade other gullible expats from parting with any of their hard-earned wealth to these shystersin future. I find it quite amazing that they currently have a base in Singapore and appear to betolerated by the authorities there, despite the fact that they were run out of Hong Kong by theSFC (generally far more tolerant than the Singaporeans). I have seen recently that UK arm of Meyado is licensed only subject to the constraint that it may not hold client money, which givessome indication of what the UK authorities think about them. Moreover, I noticed that they wererecently the subject of a winding up (bankruptcy) petitionby the UK Revenue & Customs, presumably for non-payment of taxes due – hardly something that would happen to a reputablecompany – although the petition was apparently dismissed. And this is despite the fact thatMartin Young has bought his way into the “posh” segment of society by sponsoring a fairlymajor polo competition (a big thing amongst the posh set apparently). It seems that if you haveenough money, regardless of how disreputable its source, one can overcome an alleged localsecondary school, army other rank, second hand car salesman background).The various mechanisms that Martin Young has used to fleece investors have apparentlyincluded the Velocity Fund, the Catalyst Fund (both of these before my time so I didn’t getcaught), commissions on various less than stellar investment vehicles (e.g Newstar Hedge Fund),and, most egregiously, the whole sorry saga of MITL / Meretec. This did actually appear to be aninvestment in a genuine business based round a proprietary technology for extracting the zincfrom scrap galvanised steel, but somehow the vehicle which owned the technology was sold toan Australian company (CMA Corp

) in return for a load of CMA shares which are worth nothinglike the investment that gullible people like me put into the company through convertible bondsand later shares.Of course in the meantime Martin Young extracted huge amounts of money from the company tocover his “expenses” leaving it as an empty shell which went into administration (the halfwayhouse to winding up as bankrupt) in 2008 with liabilities which more or less match the residualvalue of the CMA shares. Hence there is nothing left for the shareholders. So, in effect, thewhole Meretec/MITL history has been an extremely efficient vehicle for transferring the wealth(and we’re talking tens of millions of US dollars here) of gullible investors into the pockets of Martin Young and his cronies. It seems to me that at the very least this man is incompetent to bethe director of any company, and quite possibly he is an out and out fraudster. It is good to see