My FBME Money
Like many I just run a legitimate business as a consultant. Since most of my customers are all around the world and projects are short, a regular business entity in my home country is not easy to manage. Having an offshore company is legitimate in our industry. Opening a bank account for an offshore company is incredibly difficult in most 'normal' countries. Through my agent I had options to open bank accounts in tropical paradises (Euro Pacific Bank), Latvia (Rietumu Banka) and Cyprus (FBME). From all options Cyprus and FBME sounded like the best option. The bank was in operation for over 50 years already and there were no problems, said my agent in the UK. No problems? Yeah right! But I only found out about that when it already was too late.
How unfortunate was I to have a multi currency account at FBME. My payments were made in US Dollars, Sterling and Euro. That made it difficult in the early days when the only option to withdraw money from the account was via the bank checks. It was a difficult task, but I managed to get around 30,000 Euro from my FBME account to my account at the National Bank of Greece in Cyprus. This was needed due to the rules the administrator invented.
Currently I am waiting for approval of my claim with the deposit protection scheme. Together with my Dutch legal representative we went to the central bank and filed the claim. You can read more about the workings of the deposit protection scheme here.
How unfortunate was I to have a multi currency account at FBME. My payments were made in US Dollars, Sterling and Euro. That made it difficult in the early days when the only option to withdraw money from the account was via the bank checks. It was a difficult task, but I managed to get around 30,000 Euro from my FBME account to my account at the National Bank of Greece in Cyprus. This was needed due to the rules the administrator invented.
Currently I am waiting for approval of my claim with the deposit protection scheme. Together with my Dutch legal representative we went to the central bank and filed the claim. You can read more about the workings of the deposit protection scheme here.