Wesley K. Clark
About
A Vietnam veteran, Wesley K. Clark rose in the U.S. Army to become a four-star general and NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, overseeing the alliance’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999. He ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president in 2004. In 2010 Clark, described by Forbes magazine as a “proponent of gambling-generated tax revenue,” joined the board of directors of Amaya Inc., an online gambling and penny stock company later plagued by scandal. Montreal-based Amaya is the parent of PokerStars, a poker gaming site, and was renamed Stars Group Inc. in August 2017, months after Clark resigned.In the data
Leaked records reveal that in 2014, Amaya’s directors retained the services of Appleby’s office in the Isle of Man – the registered agent for nearly 40 of the company’s subsidiaries – to incorporate a new subsidiary on the island, called Amaya Intellectual Holdings Ltd. Its purpose was to hold the intellectual property of the entire Amaya Group.
A year later, in May 2015, Appleby’s New Business Committee noted that Clark was an independent director of Amaya Inc., the sole shareholder of the Isle of Man company in which he had no controlling interest, according to the files. When the committee recommended obtaining additional documentation on Clark, who was identified as a politically exposed person (PEP), the company complied “in order to proceed to assign the UK Amaya trademark to the new company so we can develop our portfolio,” PokerStars’s internal counsel wrote in an email. The beneficial owner of the Isle of Man subsidiary was to be Amaya’s CEO, David Baazov.
Baazov resigned as CEO of the group months later, in August 2016, after the Quebec securities regulator charged him and other executives with insider trading, alleging that he had attempted to influence the price of Amaya’s securities during the acquisition of PokerStars in 2014. Clark, who was identified in a New Jersey government report as a member of Amaya’s corporate governance committee overseeing confidentiality and trading policy as of December 2014, has not been accused of wrongdoing. Baazov has pleaded not guilty to the charges, and his trial is scheduled to start in November, according to Canadian media reports.
