Jean-Paul Braibant (Project funding scam)
We placed an ad on mycapital.com and got a contact emailfrom a fellow from Switzerland. This guy told us he can help. An ex-Bankerwould be in touch with us soon. Soon after we got a full email from a guycalled Jean-Paul Braibant. He wassending us his passport copy (Australian Passport) plus his full CV. This wasshowing that the guys us almost 70 years old and has a long standing Bankinghistory. (Not in his CV was his even more lasting scam background!) The thirddocument he submitted explained the process with a Funding company from HongKong. We agreed on having the first round of due diligence. For that of coursewe had to bear his Expenses to coming into our office. As he was presentinghimself like a business man and even provided us some evidence in form of hispassport copy plus CV, and we could not find any negative information on theNET (to be honest, u can find nothing at all which is even more suspicious now) we paid the first USD2,500, - and he came and spend 2 days with us. He lookedinto our whole business model and was even asking good questions. He started explaining us the Funding Company, the Global Project Underwriters Limited Ltd. (GPUL) from Hong Kong. Running the office in Bangkok. Previous ex-bankersworking with money from private investors ectr. And they are offering aBalloon loan over 10 years. So u only has to pay the interest rate (6.5% forthe first year and 5,75% for year 2 to 10) and after the 10 year to pay backthe whole loan amount in one lump sum. The process was explained into steps. First we have to sign aFinancial Advisory Agreement with Jean-Paul. And we have to pay a retainer ofUSD 30,000, - for his services. We had negotiations about that and agreed on a60/40 split. But u get nothing from the GPUL folks until u pay the fullretainer of USD 30,000, -. Further he explained what the Global ProjectUnderwriters LTD is expecting: U have to bring 1.5% of the funding amount in cash! Ofcourse u can split the withdraw schedule in up to 3 tranches: So egg u ask for20 Mio. USD, u can get the first tranche of 5 Mio. (That the minimum, overtimeeven we got an email that the changed this to 10Mio.) And u have to pay USD75,000, - into an Escrow Account in Hong Kong (Escrow Agents International Inc Hong Kong, also part of the scam!). After u paid this u have to bring a Letter of Credit (LC) or a Bank Guaranty (BG) that shows that u is in the position to pay the first years Interest rateof 6.5%. Last but not least GPUL will get 100% of your preference shares ascollateral into the same Escrow Account until u pay back the loan. OK: That was the deal so we signed the Financial AdvisoryAgreement (FASA) with our dear scammer friend Jean-Paul Braibant and paid thefirst USD18,000, - and he started to prepare the Application form. Plus aBoard resolution. So u have to present you company with a lot of details. Sofar it was looking very professional. We submitted the whole stuff (real paperwith all our signatures on it) and he finally submitted the whole bunch withhis recommendation to the Global Project Underwriters Ltd in Bangkok. Than it was taking a while and Jean-Paul informed us that weare happy because he got the Investment Underwriting Commitment letter fromGPUL. And we will get the same after paying the balance of his USD 30,000, -. So we paid and indeed we got the letter which was showing us that GPUL iswilling to fund us. But before we will move to the next steps we have to payfor the Documentation cost of whopping USD 32.000, -! This was never discussedand explained in detail so we have many conversation and emails exchange withJean-Paul. Finally we paid the money, this suppose to be also just a retainerand u will get this back after the first tranche will flow into our accounts. Than we got the documents (contracts) One Loan agreement, one Escrow Agreementand a Stock pledge agreement. Plus two very funny samples of LCs and BGs. Andnow TIME is of essence! U get 30 days to check all the contract and to sign thesame. We checked with our attorney and he confirmed what we felt as well: Theworst contracts he ever has seen. Copy and paste from many differentdocuments. Maybe even from the internet I dont know. But we gave not up (whata mistake) we gave tons of inputs on the entire document (which was costing mea lot to pay to my attorney) and finally we got an invitation to come over toBangkok, meet the people and negotiate the final deal. For that our scam FriendJean-Paul ask for another USD 2,500, - Expenses to go there. So we went andmed final the senior Underwriters of GPUL: John Knight. He was introducing himselfas Australian. One of my Directors is also Australian and he confirmed thatthis could be true. So we went to all our input and he told us to draft aletter to him and he will check with the legal department which sits inMauritius. All of us had a good feeling after the meeting. So weproceed to draft the letter and we got positive feedback. After a while we gotthe final contracts and a new execution date as this was taking more than the30 days we got which his first submission. We worked towards the target andexecuted the agreements: We submitted USD75,000, - into the Escrow Account inHong Kong. I started also to look into the other Escrow Items we had tosubmit: The LC/BG was turning out to become a nightmare: Honestly: Being astart-up you will not raise any of these financial documents. There is no way. U only can find a Private Investor helping u out. So we did and presented thetemplates we got from GPUL. The templates are bullshit. No prime bank willaccept and verbiage coming from a client and even worst: I had tons ofdiscussion with GPUL, because an LC is made for trading and you have to presenta commercial invoice to raise the same. NO, GPUL will not give us a commercial invoice;we can attach the loan contract as a reference. There are three ways: U find a Bank which is willing to work with u. But they are insistingon their own verbiage. Or u find a none prime bank which is accepting theverbiage, but us still have to provide a commercial invoice. The worst casewould be to find a bank really accepting the LC format given from GPUL and: Uwill lose the full money, and we are just talking about USD 650.000, -! So wefailed to provide the LC. And the two weeks before we realized this already andask for a time extension. But after the y got in total more than USD158,000, -from us they slowed down the communication. We got no feedback anymore and eventhis nice Gentleman Jean-Paul Braibant was total disappearing. So we got scammed. Meanwhile we even found that both of the web pages: http://www.globalunderwriters.Biz/and http://escrowagentsinc.com / arehosted on the same web server in Texas/US. All of these fellows are workingtogether! Jean-Paul Braibant, John Knight, an Indian Guy with the Name Chouhanand the Escrow Agents in Hong Kong. A guy with the name Victor B. Is signingall the documents. We lost a lot! Stay away from this fellow.interpol ishunting for them!
0 comments