Investor forced to delay retirement
A man who invested with disgraced Dunedin financial adviser Barry Kloogh will have to keep working after losing ‘‘sixfigures’’.
Kloogh pleaded guilty when he appeared before Judge Bruce Northwood in the Dunedin District Court yesterday.
The 56-year-old was convicted and remanded in custody.
Kloogh pleaded guilty to 11 representative charges, including obtaining by deception, forgery, theft by a person in a special relationship and issuing false statements.
He was convicted on those charges, but on another unnamed charge he was remanded without plea.
The public gallery was packed, with some of the people present understood to have invested upwards of $1 million.
While those investors continue to have interim name suppression, several spoke to Stuff outside court.
That included one man who lost – along with his partner – a ‘‘six figure amount’’.
That was a ‘‘big chunk’’ of their retirement nest egg, and he would have to postpone his retirement,
‘‘It also affects how I look after my own family.’’
He was surprised by the early guilty plea, which was a ‘‘small comfort’’, he said.
Another person invested the equivalent of ‘‘a couple of flash cars’’ with Kloogh, just three weeks before the Serious Fraud Office raided his office.
An SFO probe into Kloogh’s companies, Financial Planning and Impact Enterprises Ltd, alleges he defrauded investors of at least $15.7m.
He is to be sentenced on May 14.