Victims of Countinghouse, the crypto hedge fund whose owners allege to have been tricked into selling the fund to scammers, have taken the first step on the road to legal redemption. Papers have been filed with the Southern District of the Federal Court of Australia to force the Countinghouse owners and managers into revealing financial details that investors hope will lead them to the whereabouts of the $40 million that the fund claimed it was trading with,.
Financial Records Demanded
The filing, an ‘ancillary pursuant order’, was filed on Wednesday and gives the Countinghouse team until Tuesday to provide the court with documentary evidence of all their bank account and PayPal transactions. Investors hope that the documentation will offer an insight into the movement of funds within the company, and in particular the $40 million that represents investors’ holdings.
At this moment in time, the exact fate of the fund is still unclear, some two weeks after fund director Tim Dawson claimed that they had been “scammed by sophisticated offshore crooks”. Many investors have argued however that the Countinghouse team themselves used the supposed sale as an exit scam after stringing them along for most of 2019, and really, the truth can only lie in between these two theories.
The problem investors have right now however is that there is very little hard evidence at all, meaning that any theory is heavy with supposition, and everyone is playing a waiting game until more facts come to light. One investor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told BitStarz about the current situation:
The fact is we have very little to go on, which is causing friction within the community. Investors are rightly angry and desperate to act, but there is very little to act on, leading to misplaced energies. The team are hiding behind lawyers and are telling us nothing, so we’re having to do our own fact finding. Most of us accept that the money is gone, we just want to know what happened and if there is anything we can do to retrieve it.
Brokerage Platform Access Sought
Dawson has already stated that the team have sought their own legal counsel, and as such are not willing to offer investors further information on the exact circumstances surrounding the fund’s fate, leaving investors only able to play guessing games and go by what few hard facts they have.
Central the investigation is the fate of the $40 million, which is thought to be held on two brokerage platforms. Investors are hoping that the steps being taken with the courts will open up the possibility that they can gain access to the platform to see if the money is there, and if it’s not then where it has gone. Only then will they have a picture of what might have gone on, unless Dawson and co decide to explain themselves.
