About Tom Stanley and K2 Integrity My name is Tom Stanley and I head the asset tracing practice at K2 Integrity. This practice, headquartered in London, consists of a specialist team who work solely on asset tracing projects. We believe that having a core, experienced team of senior investigators is crucial in understanding the mechanisms through which people hide assets and gives our clients the best chance of efficient recovery. Jules Kroll, our founder and chairman, built the company on major asset tracing investigations, and is the father of the modern investigations industry. He carried out corruption investigations and asset searches against major figures including Saddam Hussein, Ferdinand Marcos, “Baby Doc” Duvalier and Arap Moi, amongst others. Our modern asset tracing practice follows this legacy, working for a variety of sovereign states, major corporations, law firms, and high-net-worth individuals. We build investigative teams around each case with support from our in-house experts around the world. These include jurisdictional experts, former prosecutors, lawyers, senior government advisors, regulators, law enforcement and intelligence professionals, forensic accountants, investigative journalists and technology and crypto experts. Tom Stanley Managing Director, K2 Integrity 5th Floor, Cunard House, 15 Regent Street St. James’s, London SW1Y 4LR Tel: +44 (20) 7016-4215 Email: tstanley@k2integrity.com www.k2integrity.com that the beneficiaries of the fraud were part of a complex network of family members and associates who had a long history of conducting similar frauds. Our evidence was crucial in demonstrating the conspiracy between people and assisting with the liquidation of entities involved in the fraud. In another recent matter, we assisted a Middle Eastern investment group by tracing the global assets of two people to support the enforcement of a multimillion-dollar legal judgment. We successfully uncovered approximately USD 65 million of assets controlled by the subjects including offshore entities that held shares in public companies, valuable European properties, and a family office with substantial investments. In one instance, we located a well-hidden apartment owned by one of the subjects through examination of historical French phone books. Our findings greatly helped our client with their enforcement strategy and led to several referrals for further investigations. What does a successful outcome look like, what are the biggest hurdles you face to a successful outcome, and how can they be mitigated? In asset tracing, success mainly involves the presentation to our client of wellevidenced control of assets by the subject of our investigation, as well as an indication of the value and any encumbrances of those assets. Ideally, this allows our client to freeze assets, enforce a judgment or apply pressure to bring parties to the negotiating table. Where control of assets is not immediately clear, we may be able to provide intelligence regarding where assets may be uncovered through either further investigation or targeted legal actions such as disclosure. This could include, for example, obtaining commentary by a former associate of the subject that they often boasted about having money stashed in offshore bank accounts, or surveillance showing frequent visits to a particular accountancy firm. Often one of the biggest hurdles we face is that our clients may be reticent to risk “throwing good money after bad” by commissioning an investigation when they have already experienced a financial loss, or the successful outcome of their legal proceedings is not guaranteed. To mitigate this, we often propose a step-by-step approach where we provide investigative phases with individual budgets. An initial phase may reveal that there are assets which are actually or potentially available, or it may reveal that the subject is being sued by several other parties, is struggling financially, and any assets are likely to be in unfavourable jurisdictions. By taking this phased approach, we help our clients control costs and help them avoid committing to large budgets at the outset. We maintain open dialogues with our clients throughout investigations and hold discussions at the end of each phase, where potential strategies for next steps can be decided or concluding that further investigation or starting costly litigation is not worthwhile. WWW.LAWYER-MONTHLY.COM 29 Beyond the technology, having experts in-house is critical to our approach.
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