The Mintz Group helps financial institutions perform due diligence before taking on customers and other relationships; and we help defend banks when various kinds of litigation are threatened or brought. Our clients include prominent investment banks, commercial banks, brokerage houses and hedge funds.

Following are representative examples of our investigative work for banks (some details in these case studies have been changed to protect client confidentiality).

Know Your Customer: Due Diligence Before Transactions
We have investigated the backgrounds and reputations of hundreds of companies and their executives for financial institutions before financings and other transactions. The facts we uncover allow our clients to make informed decisions and minimize risks before entering into new business relationships. We have learned to look for certain “dirty little secrets” that people try to hide about themselves. We list the ones we most commonly uncover in a separate booklet, “19 Things Business Executives Don't Want You to Know.”

Our reports include not just the facts on these issues, but copies of actual documents in which those facts appear.

Behind “Suitability”: Undisclosed Sophistication and Assets
We have investigated hundreds of suitability claimants for brokerage firms' counsel. We provide arbitration counsel with evidence for use in cross-examining the claimants on how sophisticated and wealthy they really are.

We have a standard approach that has worked with claimant after claimant and that lets us accurately predict how much our investigation will cost and keep the budgets low.

For example, we dug up two depositions of a customer who claimed to be unsophisticated. In one, the customer portrayed himself as a highly sophisticated investor and swore to details that directly contradicted his case against our client. The other deposition had been taken by the SEC in an investigation of potential securities-law violations.

We Specialize in Investigating Fraud

• In one case, we worked for a bank that was being sued by a secretive offshore investment firm over a transfer of restricted stock. We located people who had sued the offshore firm previously, and they identified the firm's real owners, and raised questions about the legitimacy of the underlying stock transaction. The witnesses steered us to past litigation in which the offshore firm's principals flatly contradicted statements they had made to our client.
• Another assignment was to find the officer of a small trust whose signature on a trust document was at the center of a securities-trading dispute and an investigation by securities regulators. The law firm that hired us had been frustrated in its own efforts to locate the man because of the commonness of his name.

We found him by using biographical information from archived SEC filings and telephoned him at his home. He identified the real principal of the trust, told us that his own name had been forged on the crucial trust document—and added that he had just been interviewed by the securities regulators.

Is the Borrower Really Broke?

• A bank's legal counsel asked us to help assess whether to believe one of its borrowers when he said he was broke and could not repay a $20 million loan. We focused on one line in the borrower's U.S. tax return, a $70,000 charitable contribution to an obscure religious organization in Israel. We found other creditors in Israel, who told us how the man had commingled his assets with the religious entity and was now doing business in its name.
• Our U.S. client was a judgment creditor to a Brazilian company that collapsed. The client asked us to check out rumors that the Brazilian company was paying back its local creditors while “stiffing” its non-Brazilian creditors.
  
  We quickly found a Brazilian news article accusing the company of using an offshore entity (in a Caribbean tax haven) to repay its local friends. The company denied any connection with the offshore entity, but our Caribbean sources found evidence tracing the Brazilians to it through layers of nominees.