Gold has an almost magical appeal to many people. Especially if it should drop three percent interest. That is probably why thousands of customers have responded to the offers of PIM Gold, which now evidently turn out to be fraudulent.
In the past ten years, investors have purchased around 3.38 tonnes of gold with a current market value of around € 150 million from the company Heusenstamm in Hesse. The prosecution Darmstadt has the suspicion that a large part of the gold is not available - and the PIM managers have operated a pyramid scheme.
"We expect more than 10,000 people affected," says Mirko Lehr, a lawyer-in-law at Qthority, a legal-legal platform that deals with the case. Initially, only about a thousand victims had been talked about.
The prosecution had raided the company's premises in early September and arrested 48-year-old CEO Mesut P. In addition to him, the prosecution is currently four other accused, the charge is commercial fraud. The PIM Gold Accounts have been frozen and the prosecution is currently seeking to investigate the damage, but it is said to have found only a fraction of the precious metal purportedly acquired by PIM Gold on behalf of the investor.
The company is now apparently facing bankruptcy. "Massive claims for damages due to fraud lead in my firm conviction to a bankruptcy, with a speedy application is realistic to expect," said lawyer Andreas Tilp, representing the injured, the SPIEGEL. The lawyer of the main suspect Mesut P. refused to comment on the allegations and the question of impending bankruptcy.
Yields of three percent and more promised
PIM Gold had promised investors returns of three percent or more when depositing the gold they purchased, so most customers did not let the precious metal pass. The interest should be generated through trading.
How exactly the company has tried to generate the necessary money, but is opaque. The gold trade usually throws only very low profit margins, unless the trader would take risky bets on rising prices. However, this can not be reconciled with a fixed interest rate commitment. It is also unclear to what extent customers were aware that the gold was apparently sold to them by up to 35 percent over the respective market price.
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Gold Reserves: The Treasure of ManhattanFounded in 2008, PIM Gold has been distributing entire series of gold-related products, including a kind of savings plan, and a Gold-Kids account under the slogan "Goldis Treasure Chest", which should encourage parents to save for their children.
The business grew strongly - until 2015
The question is whether the PIM Gold customers have become legal owners of the gold in the first place, since they can not be assigned individual gold bars - if they were not handed over to them. "A bankruptcy trustee will have great interest in recovering claims from customers," says finance expert Stefan Loipfinger, who has been skeptical about the development of PIM Gold for about a year. The insolvency administrator could argue that withdrawals have been unlawfully flowed from the deposits of new customers and investors therefore have no claim to it. That would be a classic snowball system.
In fact, sales at PIM Gold were made on a large scale via customers who earned lavish commissions by recommending the system. PIM Gold had installed an eight-tiered sales hierarchy with increasing royalties. By 2015, business grew vigorously. How it went then, is unclear because the company has not presented since 2016, more annual financial statements.
The BaFin Financial Supervisory Authority had already announced in November 2018 that it had indications that the child gold account offered at that time was offered without a sales prospectus required under the Investment Act, which is inadmissible. PIM Gold is said to have adjusted the terms and conditions of the product so that it could be put back into circulation.
PIM Gold classifies its products as precious metal transactions which are not covered by the Investment Act and are therefore not subject to prospectus requirements. The prospectus requirement was introduced in 2017 for products of the so-called gray - largely unregulated - capital market.
The alleged fraud involving PIM Gold is already the second major scandal in the past year and a half. It was not until 2018 that an investment fraud had flown around the company P + R Container. The Grünwalder company had sold investors over decades as safe retirement pensions until it turned out that of 1.6 million containers around one million did not exist.