‘No due diligence’ into investment

An investor in a telecommunications company developing a SIM card to cut roaming costs, lost over €1.5m as it was claimed that the company was buying cards in Florida and simply changing the sticker.

Another investor who admitted that he had done almost no due diligence investigation into Cubic Telecom lost €250,000. That investor, Adrian McNamara, a solicitor on South Mall, Cork, said yesterday: “Cubic Telecom was not a technology company, it was a system of taking a sticker off a product and putting another sticker on it. That is the most basic form of deception. I met the guy from Florida (at Dublin Airport) who told me he did it.”

Barrister Paul Christopher said that in the original business plan of Cubic Telecom, it never represented itself as being a technology company or having technologies. The barrister said that in the mid-2000s, when investments were made, it was a start-up and it was an inherently risky business.