By Mata Press Service

Vietnam has launched an international manhunt for a Canadian businessman who is accused of swindling about 1,000 people by luring them into trading in gold and foreign currencies.

Canadian, Stanley Elliot Tan, the chief representative of Golden Rock International,  an online trading brokerage company, disappeared along with his financial director Patrick Cheng Kwok Ping after getting access to nearly US$10 million of investor’s money.

Tan, born Oct 28, 1961 is reportedly carrying a Canadian passport with the number LJ 474764 while Cheng, 40, is a British national with passport number 715307324.

Media reports in Vietnam said local authorities have contacted Interpol, the Canadian embassy in Ho Chi Minh City and authorities in Hong Kong to help nab the duo.

Tan has been chief representative of Golden Rock since it was opened in August 2005.

The company was licensed to conduct market research in Vietnam and liaise with local partners on projects initiated by a Hong Kong-based company.

The company began to dabble in currency trading in January last year.

By the end of October 2006, Golden Rock had 1,000 Vietnamese clients and 200 business staff.

Though it did not function as a financial investment company, it lured money from the public by offering high interest rates of 14% and 15% per month

Under Vietnamese law, people cannot sue Golden Rock Vietnam because it acts solely as a broker for a Hong Kong firm.

Since Golden Rock was not licensed, the investors themselves could be charged for conducting illegal financial transactions.

The Golden Rock case is the second to have struck the Vietnamese middle class in recent months

The first case involved a company called VietSec, an arm of the Australia-based Somerset & Morgan Capital.

Investors told the Vietnam Investment Review the Ho Chi Minh City-based company had mobilised capital from clients to carry out gold trading activities on the Loco market in London and wooed them into trading online.

Clients were asked to pay a security deposit to Somerset through VietSec before making any transactions. They were instructed by VietSec employees to deposit tens of thousands of dollars into accounts, download software from the Somerset & Morgan Capital website and trade gold online. In the first days of trial trading, they always made a profit, but lost money on all the deals that followed.

Clients lost amounts ranging from tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Trading in gold or foreign currencies is a form of foreign exchange that must be licensed by the State Bank to be legal, according to Nguyen Thi Minh Lan, head of the State Bank’s foreign exchange management department in Ho Chi Minh City. “The State Bank has never issued such a license to VietSec and Golden Rock,” she confirmed. “Thus, those investors also violated Vietnamese laws when they directly conducted business with foreign organisations,” she added.

She also said such investors could not transfer money abroad through banks for the purpose of trading in currencies under banking rules without first declaring the purpose of the transfer.