In April, during my research on the boliburguesía, I came across a bold statement that left me speechless: DAVOS Financial Group—owned by David Osio—claimed on its website to have a “portfolio valued at over 1 trillion dollars in assets under the management of private and institutional clients.” One trillion dollars. Wow. I made sure to take a screenshot and then tweeted: “David Osio claims his bank DAVOS has $1 trillion (?) under management. Is that where most of the missing funds from Venezuela are? @davosobserver.”
The response came quickly via Twitter. DAVOS Financial Group stated that its website “had been hacked by unscrupulous hands…” However, archive.org paints a different picture, providing evidence that the attack lasted almost a year: in other words, DAVOS did not realize that its website had been “compromised” since at least August 2012, as shown here. The claim of $1 trillion was placed there by “unscrupulous hands” of hackers, and nobody at DAVOS noticed until I tweeted about it.
But the oddities of DAVOS don’t end there. In another business development literature, it claims to have $2.8 billion under management. That’s quite a discrepancy, isn’t it? From $1 trillion to $2.8 billion? In a different publication, DAVOS asserts that it “operates… under the supervision of international organizations such as: ARIF (Switzerland), FINRA and FREC (United States), CNV (Panama).”
ARIF in Switzerland has no record of DAVOS Financial Group but instead lists an entry for the asset manager D. Société financière (Suisse) SA, which DAVOS claims is its “Swiss holding.” Swiss official records show that David Osio’s control over D. Société has been revoked.
FINRA also has some very interesting information about DAVOS. There are two individuals registered as investment advisors for DAVOS: Andres Coles and Adam Stramwasser. A search for DAVOS as an institution returns two records, one for Florida and another for New York. However, on the investment advisor registration application, there’s a question that states: “Did you have $1 billion or more in assets on the last day of your most recent fiscal year?” In both cases, DAVOS responded negatively. Therefore, DAVOS misleads its potential clients in its brochure, press releases, and website or misrepresents itself in its applications to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
When I asked DAVOS what financial authority regulated its activities, it responded through Carmen Monasterio:
In response to your question, please note that Davos Financial Group operates as a financial advisory firm in regulated jurisdictions and exclusively with top-tier European and American financial institutions. As a licensed and regulated company, our compliance policies are very strict, following best practices, and are under constant scrutiny from regulators in Switzerland, Europe, and the United States. Our KYC procedures adhere to the highest standards, equal to those of our correspondent banks in Europe and the U.S. Our executives are regularly trained and certified in ALD by FIBA and other prestigious institutions.
I’m sure that DAVOS’s compliance policies in Venezuela are “very strict,” just like HSBC’s in Mexico. FIBA, which is a trade association and not an official financial oversight body, recently refused to provide information related to the credentials allegedly obtained by the staff of DAVOS Financial Group and sent an unsigned response to an information request I submitted.
I understand that DAVOS operates in different jurisdictions, so do the trillion dollars or the 2.8 billion dollars refer to all assets across all jurisdictions? Also, why would DAVOS bother to register in Florida and New York and have a couple of registered investment advisors in the U.S. only to place a disclaimer on its website stating that its services should not be considered by U.S. residents?
David Osio is a resident of the U.S., as I understand, and has even donated to the campaigns of Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Barack Obama. Does his company pay taxes on less than $1 billion, $2.8 billion, or $1 trillion?