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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.
See allThis ICIJ database contains information on more than 785,000 offshore entities that are part of the Panama Papers, the Offshore Leaks, the Bahamas Leaks and the Paradise Papers investigations. The data covers nearly 80 years up to 2016 and links to people and companies in more than 200 countries and territories.
There are legitimate uses for offshore companies and trusts. We do not intend to suggest or imply that any people, companies or other entities included in the ICIJ Offshore Leaks Database have broken the law or otherwise acted improperly. Many people and entities have the same or similar names. We suggest you confirm the identities of any individuals or entities located in the database based on addresses or other identifiable information. If you find an error in the database please get in touch with us.
The ICIJ Offshore Leaks Database is licensed under the Open Database License and contents under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. Always cite the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists when using this data. You can download a raw copy of the database here.
Help ICIJ investigate
There are legitimate uses for offshore companies and trusts. We do not intend to suggest or imply that any people, companies or other entities included in the ICIJ Offshore Leaks Database have broken the law or otherwise acted improperly. Many people and entities have the same or similar names. We suggest you confirm the identities of any individuals or entities located in the database based on addresses or other identifiable information. If you find an error in the database please get in touch with us.
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Find this content interesting and worth supporting?
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