Man who lost €500,000 in alleged fraud prays for justice

"Give me a cyanide pill and I'd be the happiest man," says an exasperated Howard Kreiss, a New Yorker who served as an Air Malta captain before losing his retirement savings of some $712,000 (€500,000) in an investment fraud.

Kreiss is back in Malta to face the umpteenth sitting in the criminal proceedings against Andrew and Patrick Zrinzo, who have been charged with fraud and misappropriation of his funds.

The ordeal he is passing through is evident in his resigned tone. He feels the prosecution against the Zrinzos is getting nowhere in establishing the whereabouts of his cash, which he says were wired out of his London accounts without his knowledge.

"Of course I want my money... it's all I saved for in a lifetime of hard work. But I also want justice," Kreiss, 66, a naturalised Maltese citizen since 2002, said. "I don't want any other Maltese national to pass through what I am going through."

The Zrinzo brothers are investment consultants who stand accused of defrauding Kreiss, and are also pleading not guilty to defrauding Saviour Borg, Lorry Borg and John Mary Farrugia.

Kreiss had been a client of the reputable stockbroker Neville Curmi since 1991, and it was there that he started investing through a young Andrew Zrinzo, then an advisor in Curmi's employ.

"We became friends over the years and I kept on investing through him. I started with $230,000 but in time, my investments grew to about $3.8 million."
Shortly after the Wall Street crash in 2000, Andrew Zrinzo, the younger of the accused siblings, opened an advisory firm of his own. He convinced me to pull out my investments with Neville Curmi and go with him instead," Kreiss said.

In November 2000, he transferred a total of $2.5 million (€1.75m) to London-based equity firm Williams de Broë, using Zrinzo as an intermediary.

"I kept track of my investments at de Broë through portfolio and cash printouts given to me by Andrew personally. I double-checked him and everything always seemed right," he said.

But in June 2007, Zrinzo suddenly became very hard to reach on any of his phone numbers. "I needed to contact him urgently to sell some stock, but he would not answer any of my messages," Kreiss said.

Kreiss had no idea that his account at Williams de Broë had in fact been closed; and that he actually got paid more money from Zrinzo's bank transfer, than the actual value of the shares he thought were sold. "I had granted Zrinzo power of attorney, which was not even endorsed by a third party lawyer. But that did not give anyone the right to transfer my money out of Williams de Broë, or worse - to close my account."

The person Kreiss spoke to at de Broë's London office asked him if he had received payments made to an HSBC account in Malta, to which he replied: "I don't have an HSBC account at all."

Williams de Broë mentioned repeated bank transfers, one amounting to $90,000, another to $77,000 and another to £40,000. "When I asked who authorised the transaction, the de Broë representative mentioned an authorisation letter signed by Andrew's brother, Patrick Zrinzo, who wrote to them using the letterhead of a company named Finacom - which I had never heard of."

Finacom, whose chief executive is Patrick Zrinzo, is the Malta-based financial arm of Brazilian agro-industry group Agrenco. Williams de Broë then produced this letter to Kreiss, which was used as evidence in a police report he later filed in Malta. In June 2008, the Zrinzo brothers were arrested and charged with fraud.

Kreiss feels aggrieved by the prosecution. "The police seem uninterested in making a find-out of any of Zrinzo's holdings abroad. I don't know when this will end... I just know that I want justice."