Dunedin firm goes legal in the Balkans

THE DRAB old-fashioned office building on Dunedin’s Moray Place seems an unlikely base for legal action against a Balkan republic and a US$400 million ($480m) claim against a Greekowned bank.

It also seems an unlikely address to be linked to overseas court proceedings involving convicted money launderers, fraudsters and an American rightwing extremist, now apparently deceased.

The Dunedin address is the registered home of Guardian Fiduciary Trust, formerly known as Capital Conservators Savings & Loan.

The current sole director of Guardian Fiduciary is one Nikola Stanojevic, of Novi Sad in Serbia, but it is the company’s previous directors who drive the action.

One, Raymond David Finzer, is, or was, the head of an outfit called the Capital Conservator Group whose website says its entire business is ‘‘meticulously engineered to guard your financial privacy’’.

Services offered by Capital Conservator include private trust banking, involving helping clients deposit cash in secret bank accounts in various countries in return for fees.

According to his Twitter feed and Facebook page, Finzer, an American who lived variously in Uruguay and Serbia, died in November, apparently from cancer. In the months before his death he continued to broadcast an internet radio programme, Truth & Lies Radio, apparently from his apartment in Novi Sad.

Finzer seems to have been a larger-than-life character, whose exploits included a brush with the law a dozen years ago when he was accused of using his overseas trust business in the West Indies jurisdiction of Nevis to launder money as part of a fraudulent

The sentence followed a US investigation led by the FBI

investment scheme. The charges were dismissed in 2004.

Another former Guardian Fiduciary director is Borko Markovic, now aged 32, from the tiny Adriatic country of Montenegro.

Markovic served as a director for only one year, resigning in September 2009 on the same day