Operational Due Diligence

The Channel Islands are a cluster of islands in the English Channel, and are often used by the UK investment industry the same way that the Bahamas are used by the US. In attempting to verify that a UK company was also doing business out of Jersey (one of the islands), I found the following link to the Jersey Financial Services Commission: http://www.jerseyfsc.org/index.asp

Once there, click on the links at the top of the page (I found this particular company under the “Funds” tab.) Then click on “Regulated Entities”. From there you can either look through a list or search for a particular name. While browsing, I saw several entities associated with companies that we have investigated before.

I’m not sure how often we will be able to utilize this, but it might be a nice addition to our UK reports.

To what extent is media used to confirm an individual’s past employment with a company?

My rule of thumb is to only use media articles wherein the individual is referred to as being from a particular company. If the article also states that the individual was previously with another company, I will use that as well.

My issue in regards to confirming past employment with media pertains to online bios. I tend to disregard employment information included due to the fact that these online bios are often the same bio provided to us by the client. I generally find these online bios to be very unreliable as far as confidently confirming past employments. Any opposing opinions?