BANKRUPTCY proceedings have begun against a former Jersey-based financier accused in the Royal Court six years ago of fraudulently extracting tens of millions of pounds from a family trust.
A hearing has been scheduled in the Royal Court later this month to allow creditors to take ownership of property belonging to James Richard De Winton Wigley, once an employee of the former Seigneur of St John, the late John Dick.
In May 2018, the Royal Court observed that much of a hearing seeking declarations regarding trust companies set up in Jersey as “the Brazilian Trusts” was spent examining Mr Wigley’s behaviour, which it was alleged involved criminal conduct.
Commissioner Julian Clyde-Smith said it would be inappropriate, in Mr Wigley’s absence, for the court to reach any conclusion about the allegation but added that there was evidence to suggest that the court should treat an affidavit he had sworn “with considerable caution”.
The commissioner referred to legal proceedings in Colorado in which Mr Wigley admitted that documents purporting to be written between 1994 and 2010 had been manufactured several years later, and that he had also admitted making untrue statements in the case before the court.
Referring to a report of the superintendent of banking in the Republic of Panama – to which Mr Wigley and his family had moved – Commissioner Clyde-Smith said it was “damning”.
“It refers to the refusal of Pantrust [which Mr Wigley operated with his son James] to provide information and to co-operate in the inspection process, using ‘all sorts of subterfuges and excuses’ and concludes that Pantrust is exercising the trust business ‘in a harmful manner’,” the commissioner said.
