Michael Creft

Regulators don't come much more corrupt and shameless than Michael Creft, who left his position as Economic Research Analyst in the Department of Highways with the Manitoba provincial government in Canada to become Grenada’s offshore banking regulator in the late 1990s. Under his watch, Grenada licensed dozens of offshore banks, virtually all of which were overtly fraudulent. Two weeks after OffshoreAlert exposed the First International Bank of Grenada, which took in more than $200 million from victims by offering “guaranteed” annual interest of 250%, Creft faxed us a letter in which he defended the bank. Remarkably, the automatically-generated header and footer on each of the three pages of the fax showed that it had been sent from FIBG’s own fax machine. He went one step further a few weeks later when he provided an affidavit “under penalty of perjury” that was attached to FIBG’s libel complaint against OffshoreAlert at federal court in Florida in which he testified that FIBG “has broken no Grenadian laws”, that he had “never received any complaints”, and there was “no evidence of wrong-doing” or even “suspicious circumstances” regarding the bank. When five of FIBG’s principals were later criminally charged with fraud and money laundering in the US, Creft admitted to prosecutors that he had committed perjury in the libel action and that he, Grenada’s Prime Minister, and others had received bribes. “On February 23, 1999, Creft submitted an affidavit in United States District Court in connection with a libel suit filed by First Bank against the journalist,” stated Assistant U.S. Attorney Claire Fay in a sentencing memorandum. “Creft admitted the affidavit was false in that it stated that there had been no complaints against the Bank and that it was in full compliance with the law. He admitted that the money he received … influenced him to sign the false affidavit.”