John Dalli’s client Marie Elouise Corbin had pulled off £8 million fraud in Britain in 1992

Published: June 10, 2015 at 2:03am

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Marie Elouise Corbin Klein with John Dalli and his daughter Louisa Dalli, in the Bahamas - in 1992, using the name Emma Corbin, she pulled off an eight million pound scam which led to her solicitor, Alan Dixon, being struck off.

Marie Elouise Corbin Klein with John Dalli and his daughter Louisa Dalli, in the Bahamas – in 1992, using the name Emma Corbin, she pulled off an eight million pound scam which led to her solicitor, Alan Dixon, being struck off.

I can report that in 1992, Marie Elouise Corbin Klein perpetrated an £8 million fraud in Britain which led to her solicitor being permanently debarred from the profession in 1997 when the matter went to trial.

Corbin Klein is the real name of John Dalli’s Ponzi scheme client known as Mary Swan or Lady Bird, who he stayed with in the Bahamas and whose Sliema flat was raided by the police a couple of weeks ago.

The solicitor, Alan Dixon, worked for Corbin Klein – who at the time went by the name Emma Corbin – in much the same way that John Dalli, an accountant, has done more recently.

A report dated 2 April 1997, in the online journal The Lawyer, says:

A sole practitioner who played a part in an £8m fraud has been thrown out of the profession.

The solicitors’ disciplinary tribunal heard how Alan Dixon got involved in the fraud when he was approached in 1992 by a woman, described as “Mrs C”, who asked him to take part in an investment scheme devised at the request of the US government to provide funds to the Russian government.

The Cambridge-based solicitor drew up documents encouraging investors to put money into the trading of “mysterious” bank documents, referred to as Prime Bank Investments and Prime Bank Notes.

Investors were told trading would be carried out through various bank accounts and they could make millions of pounds with no risk to their capital. They were drawn into an £8m fraud from which only a few have recovered their money.

Dixon pleaded naivety rather than complicity and said his actions had been in the realms of negligence. The tribunal rejected this claim and said it took the view that Dixon had “misappropriated moneys for the benefit of third parties and that in paying for his own costs and expenses he did misappropriate moneys for himself”.

Now note the similarities to how Marie Elouise Corbin Klein operated with John Dalli, his daughters and their company account at HSBC Bank in Malta for the ‘swallowing up’ of investor funds from the United States. Under the name Emma Corbin, she opened an account at Jyske Bank (a Danish bank) in 1992. Alan Dixon received her investor money into his client account. He then transferred it to her account at Jyske Bank. All of her proposed transactions failed, and the bank closed the account.

$4.4 million were transferred to another bank and apparently stolen from there.

One of the defrauded investors then sued Dixon and won, on the grounds that he should not have transferred the money from his client (trust) account to Emma Corbin’s account, on which he was co-signatory.

Dixon in turn sued Jyske Bank for not warning him that ‘prime bank note’ transactions are fraudulent and that he was at risk.

Marie Elouise Corbin Klein – Emma Corbin – was put on trial at the Old Bailey in London. I have not yet found details of the outcome of that trial, but Alan Dixon wrote a book about his experiences – called The Client’s Lost Time – in which she features under the name Emma Corbin but he features as her solicitor under the name Mark Fisher.

In his book, Dixon says that Emma Corbin suffers from multiple personality disorder after being abused by her mother and a priest in childhood, later killing her mother while she is taken over by her alter ego.

Multiple personality disorder, which is more properly known as dissociative identity disorder, is a mental process which produces a lack of connection in a person’s thoughts, memories, feelings, actions, or sense of identity, and is thought to stem from trauma. The dissociative aspect is a coping mechanism, in which the person literally dissociates himself or herself from a situation or experience that is too violent, traumatic, or painful to assimilate with the conscious self.

Unless Dixon has fictionalised this part of his narrative, this is almost certainly a sob story Corbin told him so as to win him over. There has been no evidence that Corbin suffers from this disorder, and her mother died in 2005, of old age.

Dixon describes how she told him that her boyfriend – she was then in her late 40s – trades in ‘prime bank guarantees’. It’s a scam, but he doesn’t know it yet. She tells him she is trading these ‘prime bank guarantees’ secretly for the US government, to finance the Russian government, then led by Boris Yeltsin. Dixon/Mark is then “sucked into the scam with disastrous consequences”.

Corbin then tries to kill herself, Dixon writes, and “her other persona takes over her body totally”.

Meanwhile, ‘Mark Fisher’s’ law firm is closed down by The Law Society and Fisher is struck off. He faces criminal charges.

This is where Dixon’s account becomes interesting. Corbin is arrested and her alter ego deserts her again. Her psychoanalyst, he writes, introduces her to her alter ego for the first time. They come up with a plan to defend against the criminal fraud charges Corbin faces.

The psycho-analyst asks Corbin’s alter ego to ‘merge’ with Corbin herself. The alter ego sees this as ‘dying’, but relents because it came into being to protect Corbin from pain. But there’s a problem: the Royal College of Psychiatrists does not acknowledge multiple personality disorder.

Will the trial judge do so? If he does, then this will be a novel defence in English law: that the alter ego of the person in the dock, and not the person in the dock herself, has committed the crime. But the alter ego can’t be tried because it is not a real person. The defence is successful and Corbin goes free.

This last bit sounds fictionalised. Alter egos, in dissociative identity disorder, manifest themselves for a short time only while the person is under extreme duress. They do not manifest continuously for prolonged periods of up to a year, during which time they organise scams, set up bank accounts, defraud investors and instruct solicitors, so I can’t see how the trial judge would have accepted this a line of defence, let alone found her not guilty on that basis.

However, we do know that Corbin Klein was put on trial. I wish there was some way of finding the proceedings and outcome without actually going to London to dig them out.

It’s extraordinary, though, how three years ago Corbin used with John Dalli the same method she used 20 years earlier with Alan Dixon.

The 1990s seem to have been particularly eventful for Marie Elouise Corbin Klein. Using the name Nina Petros, she embroiled the Bishop of Limassol (Cyprus) in a major financial scandal that led to his sacking. On 16 October 1998, the Cyprus Mail reported:

BISHOP BLAMES MYSTERY WOMAN

Chrysanthos, the Bishop of Limassol, continued to dominate the front pages yesterday.

Phileleftheros led with an interview of the Bishop, in which Chrysanthos blamed his plight on “mystery woman” Nina Petros who had been handling his business dealings. He said that she was “the brain” behind everything and admitted that his biggest mistake had been to trust her completely.

He felt he had been left exposed by Petros, whom he described as the key in the case. She would come up with ideas and take care of all the correspondence. He also admitted to owning a flat in Athens and a house in London.

And he even suggested the punishment that the Holy Synod could impose on him: bar him from conducting any financial dealings.

Alithia reported that a man of questionable reputation, Andreas Antoniades, a.k.a. Keravnos, was also after Nina Petros as she owed him £40,000. She had promised to pay him £80,000 to go to the Philippines and bring back gold and diamonds worth $250 million.

That’s quite a trail of wreckage for one woman to leave behind her, and these are just the random cases we happened to have found out about.

John Dalli is as cunning as they come, and I find it really very hard to believe that he didn’t get the measure of her.