Two company directors used a series of shelf companies to defraud investors in a luxury housing development of about $480 million, a court heard yesterday.
The former managing director of Gold Face Holdings, Tai Chi-wah, and company director Lim Hau-chun have both pleaded not guilty to three counts of conspiracy to defraud and five charges of furnishing false information in relation to the Villa Pinada development in Tuen Mun.
Prosecutor Wong Po-wing told a nine-member jury in the Court of First Instance that Tai, an architect, and Lim had established a company, True Gold Investments, to develop Villa Pinada and had obtained government permission to sell units there before completion.
Mr Wong said Tai and Lim engaged four firms of solicitors to take deposits and act as stakeholders for purchasers of the properties. They then created five sham companies, four of which were in the name of a Gold Face employee, and used them to create and inflate invoices for work supposedly performed at the development site, which would be verified by Tai using forged architect's certificates.
With the fake architect's certificates in hand, it was alleged the pair, via True Gold Investments, were able to convince the solicitors' firms to release the funds they were keeping against completion of the purchasers' respective units.
The three conspiracy-to-defraud charges relate to True Gold's dealings with three of the firms: Emersons, Ong and Chung, and Patrick Leong & Man.
In all three cases, the false architect's certificates assured the solicitors that work at the site had been completed by an outfit called Gold Falcon Engineering, when, in fact, the prime contractor for work at Villa Pinada was China Overseas Building Construction.