A 36-year-old Indian businessman has been arrested here on "criminal allegations" for running a fake investment scheme worth over USD 13 millions that promised to double investors' money.
Sydney Lemos, who hails from Goa was chief executive of Exential, a forex trading company in Dubai Media City, and man behind a Dh50 million (USD 13.6 million) foreign-exchange scheme that promised to double investors' money, investigators said.
Investors lost millions of dirhams when Dubai authorities in July last year closed Exential which had promised 100 per cent returns on a USD 25,000 investment.
Lemos was arrested last month after the allegations were laid at Al Barsha police station, said a spokesman for Carlton Huxley, the UK fraud investigation specialists who are working with the law firm Abdul Rahman Naseeb Advocates to recover funds.
"We are working with various authorities both inside and outside Dubai, and looking at the alleged laundering of more than Dh50m by one individual, the spokesman was quoted as saying by a UAE-based news portal.
"We have raised the question of how he could legally set up and run another investment fund when he was apparently never licensed to do this in the first place, is under investigation for illegal trading by the DED and has judgements against him from the civil courts. He has now been arrested on criminal allegations,"
Exential claimed last February that delays in processing investors' funds were related to anti-money laundering and compliance investigations in Australia.
The polic have not confirmed Lemos' legal status, the report said.
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