Mirror Trading International net-winners issued summons
Mirror Trading International net-winners have been issued summons in South Africa.
The summons are part of liquidator’s efforts to claw back money paid to MTI’s top earners.
As reported by My Broadband’s Jan Vermeulen on January 26th;
Former members of MTI have reported in online discussion groups that they received summons claiming they were net winners in the unlawful scheme and had to pay back their ill-gotten gains.
Being unfamiliar with South African law I’m not sure how long the process from here plays out. Presumably net-winners will have time to respond to the summons.
Those that pay back what they stole do so, and the rest go through court I imagine. Under South African law the summons count as debt collection proceedings.
Vermeulen reports some potential issues with some summons going out prior to court approval. Purportedly this is due to waiting any longer barring collection efforts due to time constraints (3 years).
After liquidators take their cut, monies reclaimed from MTI net-winners will be used to pay victims of the Ponzi. As of January 19th, there are 8550 MTI victim claims.
Liquidators are still in the process of evaluating the claims. As of January 26th 7268 claims had been processed.
The liquidators explained that claims can only be paid once the second liquidation and distribution account is finalised and lodged with the Master of the Court.
“If there are no objections to the account, the Master, at its discretion, confirms the account, after which dividends can be paid,” they said.
They said the soonest they could indicate how long this would take is the end of February.
I’m unclear on whether Clynton and Cheri Marks (right) have received summons.
Together Clynton and Cheri made up MTI’s two top net-winners by a large margin. They are also suspected of running Mirror Trading International alongside CEO Johann Steynberg.
Clynton Marks is believed to still be residing openly in South Africa.
Cheri Marks, who also goes by Cheri Ward, deactivated her previously publicly available FaceBook profile sometime after August 2023.
Whether this was related to ongoing MTI proceedings is unclear.
Ward is otherwise also believed to still be openly residing in South Africa, living of proceeds stolen through MTI.
Despite MTI being ruled one of South Africa’s biggest Ponzi schemes, to date South African authorities have failed to take action against Clynton and Cheri.
In related news MTI’s liquidators have been securing legal status outside of South Africa.
In December 2023 liquidators secured bankruptcy legal recognition in the UK.
The UK ruling comes after the South African liquidators received similar recognition in the US, Canada, Belgium, and Australia.
These rulings allow liquidators to pursue MTI net-winners in each of these countries. As of yet summons are believe to only have been issued to South African net-winners.
It seems the former BTC global team/MTI execs’ chickens have come home to roost.
Cheri Ward / Cheri Marks is an evil bridge troll and I want to remain positive that alongside her ex-husband Clynton Marks, the bodybuilding yeti, they will both see the inside of a jail cell one day.
It disgusts me how the prosecution of these criminals has been so badly mismanaged. It has definitely confirmed South Africa’s image as a country where crime pays.
The other issue is that there might not be anything to collect from the Marks. The first rule of financial anything is that your expenses rise to meet your income.
They might have been the net winners on paper but Steynberg controlled the IT. Clynton’s reaction when Steynberg vanished and him claiming everything was gone and he was mighty surprised and pissed off might not have been contrived.
If he had the reserves he would have gotten the hell out of South Africa. He doesn’t need to fear the SA authorities. The most damage they’ll do is not investigate when he becomes another grim statistic caused by an investor.
Ultimately that Cheri (weighing in as a Springbok Ginny Sacramoni) complains that she now has a man who doesn’t control her finances probably means she has a guy who can keep her in the vetkoek, Twinkies and takeaway fried chicken
He’s a photographer,he ain’t raking in the randelas. He’s a (better lookin by every metric) kept man.
Steynberg probably screwed them but its pretty obvious that Cheri & Clynton profited massively from the scheme. They were living in a top 1% mansion in Durban north and were seeing prowling around in massive SUV’s. Their hedonism reflects their income from ill-gotten gains.
I wonder where Clynton is now?? He has completely dropped off the radar.
As another note, I found it hilarious that Cheri was treasurer at her daughter’s school whereby she applied under her maiden name of Ward, knowing that her name as “Cheri Marks” has been tainted.
It honestly wouldn’t’ surprise me if her marriage to Clynton was not genuine anyway and that the whole divorce was planned from the start.
Its not the net winners who only received summons. People who never withdrew, amd people who managed to withdraw partially but not all they put in, have all received summons.
There is a very suspicious 6 month period of which this is executed allowing big gaps for the real thieves to get away.
Who wants to live in Durban right now?
You do this kind of stuff in SA long enough, you get Lolly Jackson’d.
If Cheri was a treasurer of a school, that school needs an urgent visit from an auditor. They should start at the tuck shop.
I am pretty sure that Cheri and Clynton took out enough to still have plenty stashed away.
Cheri is a pro at these games, so unless she is actually put into orange overalls, another scam will start soon – probably based on running tuck shops at private schools.
She played Clynton for an absolute boob throughout the game. There are many really badly harmed people around who need to remember how Cheri Marks / Ward or whatever the newest boob’s name is fooled them solidly.
There was masses of coverage of the risks of MTI, but still the shills worked the sheep.
I think whether Cheri starts another scheme will depend on how successful the liquidators are in recovering her stolen funds.
She stole an obscene amount, more than enough to retire off. Then again, this particular bridge troll has a love for lindt balls, expensive houses, etc so lets see how long it’ll last.
Given the state of South Africa’s criminal justice system, seeing her financially destitute from court repayments is probably all we can hope for here.
@Jay
From what I’ve seen in US Receiverships there is always a group of net-winners who play dumb and do their best to get out of clawbacks.
Most of them get rolled in court but there is a dispute process to sort out genuine claims. I assume there’s a similar process as part of liquidation proceedings but I’m unfamiliar with SA law in this regard.
Re. the Marks; It’s important to remember that it’s not like Ponzi go boom and admins then rush to stash away riches.
Some of that yes, but they squirrel away stolen funds while the Ponzi is running. At the end there’s not much left, they’ve already made off with their stash.
I have no doubt the Marks crime family and Cheri are sitting on a stash of the majority of MTI invested funds. Wildcard is how much Steynberg got.
The inability of SA’s corrupt and incompetent law enforcement agencies to act on this case is dissappointing. The evidence gathered during the liquidation is surely enough to at least have them arrested and charged.
If the authorities manage to get Steynberg extradited from Brazil, my hope is that he rolls on the Marks/Ward clan and/or my hope is that Cheri and Clynton turn on each other.
In another South African Ponzi named Krion (that is dwarfed by MTI in terms of money stolen) of the early 2000’s, it took 15 years to finalize the liquidation and send the culprits to jail.
The woman who was the mastermind behind the scheme received a jail sentence of hundreds of years and has to sit an effective 30 years in jail before even becoming eligable for parole. Her partners (husband, children and children’s spouses) received lesser sentences and are all out of jail by now probably.
If the back-end transaction history and the recorded history from the broker are to be believed – around 7k btc was left in MTI as a whole
Some guy called Janse van Vuuren is complaining in the SA media that he put in ZAR 20,000, withdrew it, and has now been told he’s on the hook for 97,000 because the price of the underlying BTC moved.
It sounds unfair but it really sends the message that if you are going to put money into anything like MTI long after it’s been called out as a scam it may come back to bite you. This is precisely what is needed to prevent people from knowingly becoming early investors in scams secure in the knowledge that they will score or at least be paid back. At least it will make a few people think more carefully
To be fair,he is on the hook for every dime he deposited. The fact the liquidators are even thinking about doing a money in/out calculation to determine who’s a winner is a mercy
There are very few people that get any form of sympathy from me. As far as I am concerned, people who were unaware of the warnings and expose prior to the collapse are the only real victims here.
Those who clung onto all sorts of conspiracy theories, recruited others despite the warnings, those who hopped onto the next scam after the collapse etc., they deserve to have everything taken away from them.
Funny enough, I have stumbled upon these summons. I stay in a complex and my neighbour was served.
She no longer stays at the complex, the sherrif just dropped the summons by the door.
The notebook thick summon has been sitting just by the door for quite sometime I decide to just open the damn thing, lo and behold summons from the liquidators.
From the calculations I have seen she is liable for 200kzar.
Funny.. but a bit illegal.. don’t tell anyone haha.
Clynton Marks, the fella that looks like a yeti, has just been slapped with punitive costs after unsuccessfully arguing that the liquidators be removed.
He also claimed to have made a R139 million “loan” to MTI which is top lolz. Trying to defraud the liquidators is a bold move.
moneyweb.co.za/news/south-africa/clynton-marks-fails-in-bid-to-have-mti-liquidators-removed/
It’s about time the Wards wore orange suits – as for Clayton, he’s going to have a great time with those boys in Sun city – they after all are hungry as f@&$.
These 2 are guilty as sin and deserve what’s coming.