International Staff
Our investigators have decades of experience gathering facts around the world.
For example, Jerry Gruner (who works in our Washington, D.C. office) served in the Central Intelligence Agency for 33 years and rose to Chief of Station in four key countries in Latin America, Western Europe and Eastern Europe.
Following are some examples of our cross-border investigations (some details in these case studies have been changed to protect client confidentiality):
Where Can We Sue?
Litigators who are considering where to sue an international businessperson or company often assign us to investigate whether the potential defendant has a presence in a particular jurisdiction. We start these “footprint” investigations by checking a variety of esoteric sources that have yielded results for us in past cases. Examples:
- A database of Customs records helped us tie a businessman to Bermuda. The database showed he had shipped tons of marble there, which led us to his lavishly decorated residence.
- Knowing each country's alternative to Dun & Bradstreet can be invaluable in tracing companies across borders.
- Patent, trademark and “doing business as” filings can provide valuable leads.
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.
Local Rumors
We did an investigation for the London branch of an Asian bank, after several of its borrowers went bankrupt. The loan defaults were so large that word began to circulate inside and outside the bank that one of the branch's top officers could well have been paid off by the now-bankrupt borrowers.
We dug into the background of the relevant bank officers, as well as the borrowers, looking for undisclosed ties. We found none, and our report to that effect helped the bank address the concerns of various constituencies.
Offshore and Undisclosed
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. In the article, the company's bankers were quoted as denying any connection between the company and the offshore entity. But our Caribbean sources found evidence tracing the Brazilians to this offshore entity through layers of nominees.
Counterfeits and Gray-Market Products
We have traced all sorts of counterfeit and gray-market products to their sources, almost invariably across borders, for rights holders in industries as diverse as apparel, pharmaceuticals, entertainment and machine parts.
