Courtesy of Pam Martens
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Burford Capital Ltd. is a lawsuit funding company that trades on AIM, part of the London Stock Exchange’s international market for young, growing companies. Securities and Exchange Commission filings in the U.S. show tens of millions of dollars of the stock to be part of the portfolios of big-name mutual funds in the United States, despite a governance structure that takes cronyism to a whole new level.
Since August 7 the stock of Burford has lost 44 percent of its value, as of intraday trading this morning. That’s the date that U.S. short seller, Muddy Waters, released a 25-page detailed and damning report on the company suggesting its accounting is Enron-esque.
What stopped us in our tracks while reading the report was the paragraph revealing that the Chief Executive Officer of Burford Capital Ltd., Christopher Bogart, is married to Elizabeth O’Connell, the Chief Financial Officer of the company. The couple had been married for 25 years when Burford’s Board of Directors approved her as the CFO in 2017, according to our own research.
The paragraph from the Muddy Waters’ report reads:
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