I met Obelisk the way most people meet a Cayman fund: through someone who knew someone. The pitch was clean. A segregated portfolio company, licensed by CIMA, offices on the third floor of One Capital Place. The manager, Obelisk Capital Management, did more than allocate capital: it sourced and pre-financed gold doré from mines in East and West Africa and moved it to refineries. Gold in the ground, gold in transit, gold on a balance sheet. Preferred shares in the Obelisk Global Gold Focus Fund gave you a slice of that pipeline. Both entities had been incorporated the same day, 12 June 2013. That symmetry read, at the time, as tidiness.
I subscribed in 2018. Not a life-changing amount, but not money I wanted to explain losing.
The first sign was an absence rather than an event. Audited accounts for 2018 never arrived. Then 2019's. The explanations were the usual ones: auditor delays, a change of service provider, the African logistics. Redemption notices went in and came back acknowledged, then stopped coming back at all.
In 2020 I learned from a court filing, not from the fund, that two lenders claiming $448,333 on a loan at ten percent a month had petitioned to wind up the manager, alleging serious wrongdoing. On 26 June 2020 the Grand Court put Obelisk Capital Management into official liquidation. Declan Magennis and Russell Smith were appointed joint official liquidators. My fund's manager was now, in practice, a pair of insolvency practitioners reading its emails for the first time.
Then the strange part. The liquidators petitioned for receivers over the Gold Focus Fund itself, and in August 2021 the Grand Court found itself deciding, for the first time, what insolvency even means for a segregated portfolio inside an SPC. The fund was allowed to keep operating despite being insolvent. I was, by then, a line item in a legal argument about cash-flow versus balance-sheet tests. Eight months later a Hong Kong investor, Eryi Xu, filed her own petition saying she could not redeem $600,000. I recognised every word of it.
On 31 May 2022, CIMA cancelled the fund's registration. The notice was short. No audited accounts for 2018 through 2021. Fees and penalties unpaid for 2020, 2021 and 2022. The fund was or was likely to become unable to meet its obligations. Its direction and management had not been conducted in a fit and proper manner. Lawrence Winfield Sifton and Matthew Yiu Kong Ho, the directors, were found not fit and proper to hold such roles at a regulated fund. Jazeb Matthew Jones, the controller, was found not fit and proper to hold a controlled function.
That is the whole official story. Nobody has been charged. No judge has used the word fraud. What exists is a licence revoked, a manager in liquidation, a fund in receivership, and a queue of people holding preferred shares in gold that may or may not have ever reached a refinery.
I still have the subscription agreement. It says the fund is regulated. It was. That turns out to be a description of paperwork, not of money.
Something that baffles me is that after all this, the courts, regulators, registrars knowing all this how individuals like Jazeb are still able to operate in the jurisdiction. Clearly this is a massive failure on the part of Cayman, it's various governmental agencies to prevent these actors form being able to continue to operate.
