WILLEMSTAD - At the time of the takeover of the insurance company Ennia in 2006 by the Iranian American billionaire Hushang Ansary, he made a promise that he would invest 100 million guilders to further strengthen the company financially. A little before that take-over, Ansary had already acquired Banco di Caribe.   

According to a report in the Dutch local newspaper Antilliaans Dagblad, instead of the promised contribution of 100 million guilders, the opposite happened immediately after the takeover of the insurance company. Ansary withdrew a lot of money from it. This is according to the legal documents in the liability proceedings against Ansary and various (former) directors.

A process in which Ansary withdrew money from the insurers and in which he took the assets of these insurers out of their control to use them for his own gain." These insurers actually transferred their assets to other entities.

Ansary was appointed a member of the Investment Committee which was given the authority to decide on the group's investments, and was given free rein by the Supervisory Board (SB)."

In fact, he took over control of the assets, along with two of the other defendants, namely the former directors Gijsbert van Doorn and Abdallah Andraous. According to the document that has been submitted to the court in Curaçao. A large team has been working on this extensive file full of details for quite some time.

Ennia Caribe Investments (ECI) was established in mid-2006, of which Ansary and Van Doorn were the first directors. Major assets of the insurers were placed in ECI and in Ennia Caribe Holding (ECH). The Life, Health and Non-life insurers received a claim - "without any form of security" - on the unregulated (read: non-supervised financial institutions) ECI and ECH, the so-called intercompany claims.

That way, the assets, and their management, were largely hidden from view because the insurers simply noted the intercompany ratio as an asset," the documents said. The non-regulated entities often suffered a large loss, while the insurers showed good results on paper.

At year-end 2017, the intercompany receivables of ECL (Life), ECZ (Healthcare) and ECS (Non-life) together amounted to no less than 1,273 million guilders. Nearly 1.3 billion.

The Central Bank of Curaçao and Sint Maarten (CBCS) has drawn urgent attention to the situation at Ennia, where at the end of 2016 a silent guardianship was first appointed by the CBCS. CBCS believed intercompany claims on these non-regulated entities should be reduced and that, in short, money should be returned from these entities to the insurers.

"The reverse happened again," the petition reports. On June 22, 2018, 100 million dollars (almost 180 million guilders) was transferred from ECI to the bank account of Parman Enterprises LLC, an entity of which Ansary is a majority shareholder. The CBCS immediately intervened. At the request of the Central Bank, the court of Curaçao issued the emergency regulations in early July 2018.

CBCS has thus also become a director of the insurers. “Remarkably, as a result of the CBCS intervention, an amount of $ 50 million was returned from an Ansary private account. Notable, because Parman Enterprises was supposed to pay back and Ansary did it instead. Personal and corporate interests are thus intertwined at Ansary, something which will be discussed more often in this petition.”