Keydata: Global Holdings joins court action over SLS Capital

This week, Keydata directors alleged that the firm may have been the victim of fraud at the hands of SLS Capital, which has not been paying income to clients which had invested in it since October last year. (See article.)

Now, Global Holdings has also told FTAdviser that it has £4.7m tied up in SLS, which it clients cannot access.

As a result, it has thrown its support behind Orion Life Insurance and Interalia, which it says launched legal proceedings on 25 May and put forward a petition to a Luxembourg court to appoint a government liquidator to recoup funds caught up in SLS.

Director of Global Holdings David Robbins said: "We have offered to assist financially with the legal costs in order to get matters resolved as quickly as possible.

"He or she will be appointed to review what exists in the structure [of SLS Capital] and to safeguard and decided how to proceed. For example, sell assets, ring fence assets, takeover the structure or run it to maturity.

"We’re waiting to hear from the courts, but have no indication how long it could take.".

According to Robbins, coupon payments on SLS bonds stopped last October and the company has been "fighting ever since" with BWT Capital to understand what happened.

SLS is a private company based in Luxembourg which issued the bonds and had three groups which served as SLS directors, one of which was BWT Capital, a company believed to be closely associated with David Elias, who passed away in May 2009.

Robbins added: "Unfortunately he died but prior to that he confirmed it would all be sorted out and he was arranging new liquidity management to pay coupon payments that didn’t happen and we’ve been left, it’s quite shocking."

Meanwhile, the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) has confirmed that it aims to have made a decision on whether to formally investigate the alleged fraud at Keydata within the next four weeks.