My Investment in the Amerindo Internet Fund

My 1999 investment in an Internet Technology Fund produced shares that dropped in value like an overloaded airplane running out of fuel, except just before smashing to smithereens on the ground below a tree got in the way! My shares are now balancing on the end of a rotten and very heavily laden branch; an investment that is currently worth around 30 Pounds which equates to an 83% drop in the original value put in!

All investment companies are now legally obliged to print in clear words a statement to the effect that any investment made may give a return of less value than that originally invested! This is understood by most investors, especially since companies collapse with increasing regularity but what is shocking is that many companies go down the plug-hole simply as a result of fraud. In effect we have a statement that must be included in company literature yet the reduced returns on many investments (if any at all) is not due to poor or unforeseeable investment procedures or practices but a result of a devious few who regard others money trusted to them as there own personal pleasure account!

I am not going to get my money back from the Amerindo Internet Fund! I might get the 30 Pounds and some loose change (the liquidators need to be paid for their services as well) but this overloaded branch is attached to a dead and hollow tree! As a point of interest on June 2nd 2005: The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (litigation release No: 19245) filed a complaint alleging that Amerindo Investment Advisors Inc., Alberto William Vilar and Gary Alan Tanaka, Amerindo's co-founders and principals, engaged in securities fraud by misappropriating at least $5 million from an Amerindo client. Prosecutors said the $5 million theft may be just the "tip of the iceberg" - which goes without saying!

I have in the column to the right compiled a list of links and appropriate segments of articles and views on Tanaka and Vilers and the result is quite shocking! How the plane ever got off the ground with these two unqualified pilots at the helm is beyond belief, especially considering the fact that they seem to have spent more time looking at themselves in the mirror than through the cockpit windscreen in front of them!

Looking at my precariously hanging and worthless shares, the fact that the company is currently facing voluntary liquidation and that their websites are inaccessible I can appreciate the fact that the plane has in fact fallen onto the rocks below and what remains is merely the pickings of a blind scrap merchant who's seen it all before! But where are the original pilots who took off with all the skill of a trainee milkman high on 'magic mushrooms'!

Alberto Vilers; the self-styled villain is currently keeping his bunk warm in Manhattans Metropolitan Correction Center! His previously advertised billionaire status seems to be failing him at this minute as he cannot locate the 4 million required to post bail (his friend and confidant Tanaka seems unwilling or maybe unable to help out at this time)! "My only vice...", Alberto Vilar once confessed between sips from a Starbucks cup, "....is hot coffee! I don't drink and I don't smoke." That utterance alone is worth ten years behind bars!

Gary Tanaka; partner-in-crime, was once-upon-a-time a student at the Imperial College in Wye, Kent. Turned Venture Capitalist he promised to donate 27 million pounds to build the new business school. When this kind gesture was offered in 2000, David Norburn director of the former Imperial College Management School described him as "one of the most exceptional entrepreneurs of our time". When pressed on this last year he asked, "did I really say that"? Tanaka has managed to find the ten million required for his bond so he is slightly better off than his mate! It is quite obvious that these 'low-lifers' both spent money on a variety of self-improving and image enhancing projects that drew on shareholders funds! In other words my hard-earned savings went on gambling, the purchase of a name on a building through bribery and excessive horse racing, not to mention the thousands of other donations and name-piling that meant nothing to anybody except those who bought them!

I am a hard-working ships engineer with a family to support! I have between now and retirement the near-impossible task of building up a pension fund or investing in mutual funds so that when I stop working I can at least afford some bread and water and a little bit more than a government sponsored tarpaulin over my head! The banks of the world do not offer incentive to save with them; their highly advertised interest rates are usually less than the going rate of inflation and once the bank-charges are applied the beans aren't worth counting! I once invested a lump some in some Government Savings Bonds and when it all came to fruition after five years I got ….. not much to show for it! So I currently opt for shares in established Investment Trusts and although Amerindo was outside my normal scope I went for it in the hope that I would at least get back what I put in if not slightly more!

I did not expect to be paying for the Vilar Distinguished Artist Series at the Washington & Jefferson College, pay for a party (I wasn't even invited) to the tune of $14,640, and pay for the repair of a dishwasher in a $12 million dollar mansion! I certainly disagree with paying for somebody's name to be pasted on the interior wall of the Metropolitan Opera House and do not condone the purchase of racehorses at incredible cost!

With the collapse of various companies around the world e.g.; Enron, World.com, Daewoo, etc. it is blatantly obvious that there is in-fact nowhere for the 'little' man to save his money with impunity! Established companies are either controlled by money grabbing freaks and are likely to fall apart at the seams or the directors are living comfortably in the Bahamas or Canary Islands after jumping ship with the pension fund stashed in their sea-chests! It is excellent news that people like Vilers and Tanaka, and others like CEO Dennis Kozlowski of Tyco whose most outstanding use of others money must be the a $6,000 shower curtain bought for his opulent Manhattan apartment, CEO Bernard Ebbers of WorldCom who successfully orchestrated the buildup towards an $11 billion accounting fraud that drove the telecommunications company into the swamp and Kim Woo Choong, the founder of Daewoo who despite bringing around the near collapse of the company through serious misappropriation of company funds may not serve sentence due to his 'age and frailty'! (NB: Kim Woo Choong was found guilty of masterminding an accounting fraud to the tune of more than W20 trillion, taking out loans of W9.8 trillion on false premises and spiriting large sums of the defunct group's money overseas).

It can be said with utter conviction that many other companies around the world are probably guilty in one way or another of serious misappropriation of funds, accounting scandals, dishonesty and use of company pension funds to line the directors and controlling stockholders pockets! It seems, like many politicians that greed and self-gain go hand-in-hand with power and as always the small man suffers!

I am now struggling back up the hill after my disastrous foray into share-buying and the entrustment of my hard earned money to supposed experts! Some people though have been knocked flat and will stay down; those near retirement who invested all of their savings with such companies and supposed trustworthy people now have nothing except the pittance offered by governments and in some cases not even that! I for one feel that the sentences given to these directors and criminals is far too lenient, they have totally ruined thousands of lives and should pay dearly for it. Those who have been fined and now languish in jail, writing books about how they 'never did anything wrong" and those who have been considered too ill to serve sentence should be shunned by society, ignored and forgotten about; left to die unwanted and extremely lonely like the scum that they are!

I must now draw this article to a close as writing it makes my blood boil! I do though need to say one more thing before I go and count my piggy-banks contents! If my money is unworkable whilst sitting in a bank, of no increased value after my government gets its hands on it and typically worthless once investment companies collapse like dominoes what am I supposed to do? Live under the Tyne Bridge now or wait until I'm 65 years old and then jump off it? I have thought about property, but with British house prices now perched on top of Mount Everest they are to most people unattainable - especially with the introduction of the fifty-year mortgage! I have thought about arms dealing, drug-pushing and pornography but then if caught I may have to associate with such criminals as Vilers and Tanaka, a punishment worse than death!

Incongruously I feel that I am forced to spend the money I have now rather than to save it! At least when I am 65 and joining the end of the queue at the Salvation Army soup-kitchen or opting to take the short-way down from the top of some tall building, I can say that I have had a good life!

Finally chew on this: when I enter the word "Amerindo" into my Firefox Browser I am redirected to an 'under construction' notice for a website of Albert Vilers! God help us!

Ieuan Dolby
Author and Webmaster of SeaDolby.Com

2nd June 2006

Allegedly, Vilar induced a longtime client to invest $5 million with Amerindo, transferred the money to personal accounts and then made misrepresentations about the status of the investment. "Vilar allegedly used the stolen dough," Reuters reports, "to make a $540,000 contribution to his alma mater, Washington & Jefferson College in Pennsylvania; make a $177,000 donation to the American Academy in Berlin; cover the $14,640 cost of a party he threw, and pay for the repair of a dishwasher in his $12 million, 30-room co-op in the shadow of the U.N."

"He's a miserable human being and a basic scumbag," says Donald Trump. "He spent $2 million trying to fight me when I wanted to build the Trump World Towers...He was intractable and foolish and he ended up getting his [butt] kicked by me." Trump means that the towers were built.

Gary Tanaka was once-upon-a-time a student at the Imperial College in Wye, Kent. Turned Venture Capitalist he promised to donate 27 million pounds to build the new business school. When this kind gesture was offered in 2000, David Thorburn director of the former Imperial College Management School described him as 'one of the most exceptional entrepreneurs of our time, which makes him the ideal role model for … Imperial students.' When pressed on this last year he asked, 'Did I really say that?

Most of the money must have got through as the Tanaka Business School which promises that, 'Learning core management disciplines from an internationally respected faculty, you gain both the perspective to ask the right questions and the skills to deliver convincing answers, opened up in 2004!

In July 2005 Tanaka and his business partner Alberto Vilar were arrested and charged with fraud. They were initially accused of stealing $5 million from a client of their company Amerindo, which they allegedly used for personal use and donations to various philanthropic causes. The pair will now go on trial in October and have both pleaded not guilty to 12 counts including securities fraud, wire fraud, mail fraud and money laundering. The two are accused of defrauding investors between July 1986 and May 2005 by soliciting millions of dollars under false pretenses and misappropriating those funds, according to the indictment. Tanaka is reportedly under house arrest in New York.

Born in Hunt, Idaho on June 23, 1943, Gary Tanaka moved to London, England, from San Francisco in the early 1980's, where he now manages institutional stock portfolios through Amerindo Investments Advisors, Inc., with offices in London, New York and San Francisco. Tanaka studied at MIT in Boston, then acquired his PH.D. at Imperial College in London.

Over the years, Tanaka has developed an investment philosophy of purchasing older or proven horses in Europe, rather than yearlings, with the intention of racing them in North America, where he has enjoyed great success. His first purchase, in 1993, was a majority interest in Party Cited. Then he bought a half-interest in Group I winner User Friendly with partner W.J. Gredley and stakes-placed Corrupt, with Robert Sangster. In 1994, his Dernier Empereur, trained by Andre Fabre, won the Champion Stakes. Another of his acquisitions, Celtic Arms, won the 1996 Pan American Handicap.

In 1999, he purchased four-year-old Docksider in England and saw his colour-bearer finish second to Cape Cross in the Queen Anne, second to Aljabr in the Group 1 Sussex Stakes, third in a three-horse photo to Silic and Tuzla in the Breeders' Cup Mile, before winning the Hong Kong Mile. In 2000, Snow Polina won the Beverly D and was fourth in the Breeders' Cup Filly and Mare Turf.

Hightori was a major winner for him in 2001, capturing the Prix Foy at Longchamp, finishing third to Galileo and Fantastic Light in the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes in July and third to Fantastic Light in the Prince of Wales's Stakes. Gourmet Girl won the Grade 1 Apple Blossom. In 2002, Golden Apples won the Beverly D and Yellow Ribbon Stakes, and finished a close fourth to Starine in the Breeders' Cup Filly and Mare Turf. Also, his Falcon Flight was second to Ballingarry in the Canadian International, then third to High Chaparral in the Breeders' Cup Turf while another runner, Sarafan, won the Grade 1 Eddie Read.

Last year, Tanaka enjoyed tremendous success on both sides of the ocean, racing multiple stakes-winning sprinter Pico Central in the United States and the outstanding Rakti, winner of the Group 1 Queen Elizabeth II Stakes and Prince of Wales's Stakes at Ascot.

Of all the internet true believers, few suffered more publicly in the aftermath of the dot-com collapse than Alberto W. Vilar. Between the NASDAQ peak in early 2000 and its nadir in late 2002, capital managed by Vilar's Amerindo Investment Advisors Inc., one of the most aggressive investors in tech startups, dropped from $7.5 billion to less than $1 billion. Insult to injury: His name was stripped from the interior wall of the Metropolitan Opera House after he asked to delay payments on a $20 million pledge.

Well, Vilar is trying to make a comeback. The value of Amerindo's holdings in its private equity and mutual funds has climbed more than 200% from its trough, and now he's hoping that the anticipated initial public offering of Google Inc. fuels a runup in newly issued tech stocks -- boosting Amerindo. The courtly 63-year-old Cuban American clucks with anticipation. "One of these days we'll get a very big bounce," he predicts.

He's not the only one who stands to gain. When Amerindo is flush, Vilar takes sizable stakes in startups both before and after they go public, then often holds the stock for years. That has made the firm's marble-and-glass offices on New York's Park Avenue a magnet for entrepreneurs on tech road shows. Much of the world's opera community is rooting for Vilar as well. He's the No. 1 patron of that art -- to the tune of nearly $100 million in pledges over the past decade. If the markets cooperate, he plans to open his wallet again. But he warns: "Some people will not be on the list."

Court papers say Vilar put the money in an account that serves as a "personal piggy bank to pay personal expenses and make charitable contributions." Some of the money went to his alma mater, Washington & Jefferson College, which includes the Vilar Distinguished Artist Series and the Vilar Technology Center. Some went to the American Academy in Berlin, where Vilar is a member of the president's circle.

My only vice, Alberto Vilar confesses between sips from a Starbucks cup, "is hot coffee. I don't drink, and I don't smoke."

"He is the most passionate music lover you could imagine," says Franz Xaver Ohnesorg, intendant, or managing director, of the Berlin Philharmonic. "He's very generous, not only financially, but in his thinking about what an institution should do, because he wants to be the great model." Vilar wakes up at 5:15 each morning, usually skips breakfast, and truncates his lunch hour so he can put in a twelve-hour work day at Amerindo, the Park Avenue investment firm he co-founded in 1979, and still be free by curtain time.

Early on, he and his partner, Gary Tanaka, sank all their investment expertise into companies at the forefront of digital technologies -- Microsoft, Cisco, and the like -- and made a lot of money fast. Today, his private world includes five homes, the use of a private jet, and a lot of tuxedos. But Vilar has been giving money away since well before he had millions to give.

"Even back in our poorer days, when we just started our operation," says Tanaka, who now works out of Amerindo's London office, "he was always interested in philanthropy."