I have built this site for 3 reasons:
It happened in February 2018, at that moment I was at 9+ years into a successful career in precious metals trading and investment management until Saturday the 3rd, when someone fuck it up…
No, not me, I don't even know the guy personally, except for one appearance in court.
It was a customs officer the one who fuck it up. He was not even there that day, he sent another guy to do his job, who himself didn't knew how to do the job either, and they almost ruined my life.
It was just one of those black swan events of inexplicable timing and combination of ignorance, authority, power and greed. And because of that, I I had to spend a weekend in jail, and face a legal process that took me 3 years to set the record straight.
Now, I am not saying that I am saint, not even a good person, but I do give and demand excellence when it comes to work. And I remember being taken into custody because a customs officer didn't know how to do his job, and thinking to myself "Oh my god! I have so many things to do on Monday, and I am not allowed to use my phone!"
(it's only funny now… it was not funny then).
Seriously, I had just been promoted by a HNWI to manage the entire investment operations of his private fund and now, not only I was missing to report to work on my first day, but I was not being able to answer the phone either. Consequences to that are obvious.
I was heard by a constitutional guarantee judge specialized in economic crimes on Monday the 5th. This judge is not in charge of judging the case, he is only in charge of verifying that you are not sent to jail unnecessarily and to receive the evidence that will be later delivered to the court of 3 other judges that will then judge the case. The hearing lasted 1 hour because there were 3 of us, and after examining the documents, we were all released and sent home.
After almost a year, I was offered a plea deal by the prosecutor, who told me that he presented the indictment because he had no reason to doubt the word of a public servant (the customs officer), and given my track record and reputation he offered me to face no consequences if I accepted the responsibility and consented to close the case.
Of course I refused, what else could I have done? I came all the way from my humble beginnings in the middle of nowhere. My name and my skills have a value to me, a higher value than losing all my savings to afford the legal process and survive while no one will give me a job because of the newspaper publications.
Finally I got to trial in December 2020, and of course, I won…
Not only was my innocence, and that of the other guys, proven, but it was also proven that such alleged accusations were false.
What was the accusation about?
I was advising a client in the delivery of a futures contract in a precious metals export process. I was acting as a registered international trade lawyer and, at that time, after a decade of using the same system, the Customs Authority had changed the clearance process and documents formats to paperless, and this operation in particular was actually the first one they had approved since the new system started operating.
The custom officer who was verifying on boarding of declared goods didn't recognized the format of the new authorizations and accused me (together with the client and the broker) of trying to use fake permits to export gold, and he did not even verified the document with the clearance system but instead requested immediate intervention of the police and presented a complaint to the prosecutor who just as immediately decided to indict me and the other guys.
During the trial, when asked by the court, the Customs Authority itself confirmed that such a permit was issued by their platform and that this was the first user trial, dismissing the accusation made by this one officer who caused the whole trial.
There is nothing to compensate for the hell I have gone through for 3 years, and yet, the publications won't go away and Google says I have to be a EU resident to own the right to be forgotten.
After 3 years of burning my reserves and having lost almost all clients because no one could work with me until I was acquitted from any responsibility, my career as money manager was probably over, so the first thing I did when the nightmare ended was to take the little money I had left, and get myself back to the markets.
I really have no time to lose in sorrow, I just wanted to set the record straight
Nowadays I am trading precious metals commodities in the London market as well as Equity and Options in the US markets
I have a special love for the markets because it is the only area of life where you get to compete that often, to win that often and to lose that often. The market does not care who you are, it only cares about how good you are, and how fast you learn. It is the great equalizer. There I am equal to the giants.
Thank you for reading.
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