ACCELERATED Capital Firm Inc. (ACFI)’s Yuri Garcia Dominguez, on Saturday, confirmed that the company will begin repaying its more than 17, 000 investors on October 12.
The alleged Ponzi schemer made the announcement during a press conference held at Sharon’s Building, in the office of his attorney, Dexter Todd.
He and his Guyanese wife, Ateeka Ishmael, who are the principals of the company, are currently on a total of $30 million bail each after appearing before multiple courts on several fraud charges.

During the press conference, he said that his company will be repaying its investors and also plans to cease all operations in Guyana until it receives a licence to operate from the relevant authorities.

Dominguez explained that the stock market crashed as a result of the coronavirus pandemic and this has resulted in a delay in payments to its investors.
However, he stressed that his company will be utilising the Demerara Bank account which was opened by the Government to facilitate payments to its investors.
Meanwhile, Todd informed that the company had never acquired a licence to conduct the trading which is a major problem.

“The licence that is required under the laws of Guyana was not acquired and for that reason the company must cease operations. It would be the most reasonable and prudent thing to do, to exit those contracts and that is what the legal team has been putting together,” Todd said.
Todd further explained that as of now the cases before the court involves over $70M. The attorney did not provide more details as the matter is still before the courts.
Within a two month period, the couple made appearances before several Magistrates in the Georgetown and East Coast Magisterial Districts. The couple is accused of swindling unsuspecting persons out of millions of dollars.

Many persons have come forward and lodged complaints with the police. Investigators were told that some 17,000 Guyanese collectively invested approximately US$20 million in the company, but never saw any returns as was promised.

The duo was first held by the police in early August following an investigation into widespread rumours that they were running a “Ponzi Scheme”.
A Ponzi scheme is a form of fraud in which investors are made to believe in the success of a non-existent enterprise, and encouraged to invest because of the payment of quick returns.
It was claimed that the first investors were only being paid from money invested by successive investors, but the couple has vehemently denied this. They had claimed too that money for refund was ready to be disbursed.

The police here have listed Dominguez, a naturalised Guyanese of Cuban origin, and his wife, who is Guyanese by birth, as grave flight risks given that they have no assets in the country.
The couple is alleged to have been operating their investment company, ACFI, here in Guyana from as far back as 2017 without the required licence from the Guyana Securities Council (GSC).
ACFI has been attributing its failure to remit refunds to clients to the absence of a bank account. Several local commercial banks have closed whatever accounts they had held with them, the company had claimed.