A Greek man claiming to be a relative of late Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis has lost millions of US dollars in a bogus investment plan by a Taiwan-based ring, police said yesterday.
One Taiwanese man had been arrested for alleged involvement in the case while four others are wanted on suspicion of fraud and forgery, police said.
Tryfon Ath. Kolovinas, chairman of the Hong Kong-based Tryfon Holdings Ltd., told Taiwan's TVBS that the suspects had tried to win his trust by taking advantage of his interest in old US dollar bills.
Kolovinas claimed Onassis is his mother's cousin and that he used to work as a financier for Onassis, a Chinese-language newspaper reported.
He said the suspects had taken him to a cave in suburban Taipei where he was shown boxes that they claimed contained US dollar bills more than a half-century old, worth hundreds of millions of dollars today.
"I saw two or three boxes, but I was not sure if inside the boxes was real money," Kolovinas said.
He also told reporters he had learned about the old dollar bills from local Taiwanese newspaper reports.
Kolovinas signed a contract on Jan. 25 last year with the ring which promised to finance his company US$500 million for a 20-percent return over a 13-month period, the newspaper said.
Kolovinas claimed he had spent US$3.5 million to prepare for the investment, only to find out later that a certificate of deposit presented by the ring was bogus, according to the paper.
He also had to pay US$35 million in compensation to banks dealing with his company for the would-be investment projects, Kolovinas said.
Kolovinas, who reported the case to Taiwan police in May last year, came to Taipei recently to attend investigative hearings.
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