An American heiress has dropped a bombshell, possibly precedent-setting $12 billion lawsuit against some of the world’s biggest banks – accusing them of helping her late father loot her $350 million trust fund.
Tanya Dick-Stock, the daughter of late Canadian-born Denver real estate mogul John Dick Sr., and her husband Darrin Stock, sued Barclays, HSBC, and multiple trust companies in Colorado District Court on Dec. 5th, claiming the banks unlawfully handed control of her $350 million trust to her father, according to a complaint filed by their lawyer, former US presidential candidate John Edwards.
The case reveals how Dick Sr. allegedly helped an international rogues’ gallery hide their money — including convicted siblings of child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell — thanks to a staggering horde of documents that Dick Sr. hid, and that the Stocks found, inside the family’s former 400-year-old manor house on the Isle of Jersey, an infamous offshore tax haven for the rich and powerful.
Dick Sr.’s trust company, La Hougue, is now a key target of the US Senate Finance Committee’s investigation into how the late convicted pedophile and former Maxwell boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein financed his international child sex trafficking ring, The Post has learned.
In September, Senator Ron Wyden, the Senate Finance Committee’s ranking member, introduced the Produce Epstein Treasury Records Act to compel Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to release Epstein-related Treasury records to Senate investigators.
In a letter to Sec. Bessent, Wyden (D-OR) asked for files relating to 58 individuals and entities “with documented Epstein ties” — and La Hougue was number 20 on the list.
Dick-Stock’s Colorado trust was built with a key safeguard: any successor trustee had to be a US-regulated bank or trust company.
But, the complaint alleges, the trustees committed “fraud on a power” when they improperly appointed Isle of Jersey-based La Hougue. The trust also stipulated that Dick Sr. was not to benefit from it.
All told, the complaint alleges decades of fraud, fake loans, backdated documents, and commingled accounts to “benefit others, including themselves,” instead of Tanya.
“While investigating the loss of these millions of dollars, more than 300 boxes of documents were found that include forged loan agreements, wire transfer confirmations, internal memos/emails between the defendants, banking records, and other records of their breach of fiduciary duties,” according to the complaint.
At the geographic center of the allegations is the Isle of Jersey, a tiny British Crown Dependency off the coast of France that long ago swapped butter and cows for trillions in offshore cash.
The isle is where Maxwell’s brothers Ian and Kevin Maxwell hid money offshore with Dick Sr.’s help following the 1991 death of their father, press baron Robert Maxwell, whose body was found in the water off the Canary Islands near his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine.
Dick-Stock’s trust, which was established in 1984 as part of her mother Mary’s divorce from Dick Sr., held legitimate Denver real estate, as Mary was “instrumental in the creation of and stewardship of the family’s wealth,” according to the December lawsuit.
“It was thanks to Mary that the trust was set up in Denver and required trustees to come from US banks and trusts,” a source said. “Tanya wants no part of the money made by her father offshore, later on.”
In another scandalous twist, Dick Sr.’s client list was made public around five years ago, thanks to an explosive stash of 350,000 confidential documents that Tanya and Darrin stumbled upon in a locked squash court. To their shock, they soon discovered that her father was at the heart of the fraud.
The client list also includes unsavory characters such as Russian oligarch Alexander Zhukov — Roman Abramovich’s ex-father-in-law; Israeli art dealer Ronald Fuhrer, linked to a missing Botticelli; American porn king Eddie Wedelstedt, who was convicted of tax fraud and obscenity charges in 2006; Igor Vishnevskiy, the former head of Glencore in Russia; and individuals involved in the theft of more than $100 million during the 1980s Savings and Loan scandal.
The documents show how La Hougue helped its clients while breaching its fiduciary duties to Tanya, in part by creating fake loans and fake debt and commingled accounts, according to the court complaint. There’s even material that La Hougue purportedly sent to clients outlining how it can help them evade taxes.
Tanya and Darrin allege that when co-trustees Barclays Bank PLC and Barclays Trust International (BTI) resigned from the trust in 1995, they committed “fraud on a power” because they improperly appointed the new trustees at La Hougue, run out of the 400-year-old St. John’s Manor on Jersey and served as Dick Sr.’s his “alter-ego,” according to a prior court ruling in Colorado in a 1992 divorce case involving Dick Sr. and his second wife.
The Stocks maintains that La Hougue never legally controlled the trust, which was created in Colorado, because a trust provision required successor trustees to be from a US-regulated bank or trust company. That made the new trust appointment a “fraud on a power,” that is void ab initio – null and void from the start.
Tanya and Darrin argue Barclays and BTI never successfully resigned and therefore they remain the trustees – making them responsible for the losses and damages of at least $12 billion.
If the couple wins, their argument could set a new precedent for activists seeking to hold big banks responsible for fraud against individuals and large pension funds, said James S. Henry, co-founder of United Against Money Laundering and a Global Justice Fellow at Yale.
“We’ve seen the decimation of anti-corruption and anti-money laundering regulations, so this effort to involve private litigation comes at an essential time,” Henry said.
Nonetheless, it’s rare for trust recipients to get justice. By the time fraud is discovered, statutes of limitation have often kicked in, banks can also take years to produce court-ordered documents, or claim they are missing, and they can also often outspend victims in wars of attrition.
But Tanya and Darrin have deep pockets – and documents. In addition, ‘fraud on a power’ – a legal doctrine in Britain and Jersey – doesn’t have statutes of limitation.
Nor does it require plaintiffs to prove fraud. Instead, they just have to prove an improper purpose in exercising a trust power, legal experts say.
“I have spent a significant amount of time investigating this case, looking at the documentary evidence to evaluate it, and I believe there is a good faith basis for what we found in the complaint,” Edwards, the Stocks’ lawyer, told the Post.
Barclays and HSBC declined comment; the trust companies didn’t return requests for comment by The Post.