The Autorité Des Marchés financiers, the securities regulator for the province of Quebec, will continue its provisional administration of Triglobal Capital Management Inc. — or what is left of it.

While Triglobal itself has ceased to exist, the AMF has extended the freeze order issued on Jan. 24 against its related companies for three more months: PNB Management Inc., 2967-9420 Quebec Inc., 4384610 Canada Inc., and 4191424 Canada Inc.

The freeze order also includes the former Triglobal leadership: Themistoklis Papadopoulos, Mario Bright, David Mizrahi and Brian Ruse.

Triglobal, the disgraced mutual fund dealer, is at the centre of a scandal that has exposed the disappearance of more than $86 million dollars in investors’ funds, according to the provisional administrator’s report.

On Oct. 10, at the request of the AMF, the Bureau de décision et de révision en valeurs mobilières, the independent tribunal for securities regulation, extended the provisional administration of Triglobal by Jean Robillard of Raymond Chabot Grant Thornton LLP of Montreal for another 90 days. The tribunal has agreed that the conditions that required the freeze in January still exist.

The extension comes while investigators are waiting for information from regulators in the Cayman Islands. They are hoping to obtain additional documents relating to the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority’s investigation of Focus Management Inc. , a Cayman Islands-based hedge fund.

Along with securities issued by Ivest Fund Ltd. and Tricap Futures Fund, two mutual fund companies based in the Bahamas, Papadopoulos and Bright (among others) presented Focus instruments as investment opportunities to their clients. None of the funds had a prospectus and they could not be legally distributed in Quebec.

In January, Robillard and Maria Ferere, an accountant in the Bahamas, were named provisional liquidators of Ivest and Tricap. Robillard became a liquidator of Focus in February. The Focus fund, which was the last known destination for most of the missing money, is key to understanding the alleged swindle.

The AMF’s provisional administration dates back to Dec. 21 of last year, when the AMF named Robillard as Triglobal’s provisional administrator. The investigation itself goes back even further. In the fall of 2007, investors alerted the AMF that they had not been paid the interest due on instruments sold by a handful of Triglobal advi-sors, including its executives. When Triglobal could not make good on either the interest promised or the principal of investments they had presented as debt instruments, the investors went to the AMF.

There were other signs of trouble. Triglobal, which had been tagged the year before as an up-and-comer in a Canadian Business magazine profit survey, was hemorrhaging advisors.

In the course of the investigation that followed, it became clear that the key players — Papadopoulos and Bright — had been funnelling money into offshore hedge funds in the Bahamas and the Cayman Islands. Meanwhile, a handful of advisors in Papadopoulos’ and Bright’s inner circle were presenting the funds to clients as conservative offshore investments. It also became clear that a network of other companies were involved — PNB Management and other companies had reimbursed some of Triglobal’s investors.

Robillard brokered the transfer of most of Triglobal’s advisor network to Promutuel Capital Trust Co. Inc. early in 2008. While business as usual for Triglobal ceased in February, on Aug. 26, Triglobal’s creditors accepted Robillard’s proposed liquidation.

The AMF’s continued investigation of the Triglobal scandal fits with the regulator’s aggressive pursuit of securities fraud in the Quebec marketplace. Just after the Triglobal provisional administration began, the AMF succeeded in getting jail-time for Vincent Lacroix, the architect of the fraud that built up and brought down the Norbourg group of companies.

In recent months, the AMF has proceeded to lay hundreds of charges against several Mont Real Corp. executives, another elaborate scam involving several companies. Potential fines related to those charges are in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

The AMF’s aggressive tactics are cold comfort for Triglobal investors and advisors, however. There apparently is little money to satisfy Triglobal’s debts, a large chunk of which was unpaid commissions for its advi-sors. Unfortunately, there appears to be even less money available to satisfy investors. IE