How the Teachers Group used offshore accounts, front companies, false invoices and fake letterheads to cream off the profits from Humana charities, 1990-2000
by ‘Whistleblower’
Links have been restored
As told to Tvind Alert
‘Whistleblower’ is a Dutch former Tvind employee who worked for ten years in the Teachers Group’s used-clothes business in Amsterdam. He has come forward with information about the methods the TG used to evade tax and cream off profits from Humana and UFF used clothes boxes throughout Europe. This is his story.
I didn’t go to a Tvind college. I was recruited to work direct for Tvind in Holland in the used-clothing business in around 1990, after replying to a job advert.
And I never joined the Teachers Group, but I knew all the Tvind people in the Netherlands, and a lot from elsewhere too. I dealt with a lot of paperwork, sales and invoices. My job was to work out the logistics and movement of clothes between various suppliers and customers all over Europe and the USA.
I ended up staying for ten years and a day.
My employer was an Amsterdam-registered company Textile Transformation EC Trading BV – a Tvind company, of course. I worked direct for a man named Flemming Gustafsson, a Teachers Group member. (He is now elsewhere but still working for the TG, probably in Africa – and is wanted by the Russian FSB for a recent timber scam.)
EC Trading (for short) was the equivalent of the current TG clothes broker Garson & Shaw, a middleman company that never handled any clothes - there was no warehouse and the company did not make any collections.
Essentially the purpose of EC Trading was to buy clothes from UFF (Scandinavia) and Humana (rest of Europe) charities and drop-in box schemes. EC trading bought all the good quality ‘surplus’ clothes that had been donated to UFF/Humana but were not suitable for Africa – that is coats, woollens, and so on. They would then sell them on to East Europe and other places. But we never actually saw the garments at all.
In the beginning it seemed like just another job, but gradually, as the boss was often out on trips, I took on more responsibilities. I noticed some odd things. I began to see more and more strange mail coming in, that it was sometimes my job to open and deal with.
There were two key paperwork scams we used that made sure that as much money as possible went to Tvind, and not to either of the charities.
Here’s how it worked:
EC Trading dealt exclusively (more or less) with three ‘sales offices’. They were companies called Holland House, Agence Notre Dame and Transco Shipping. They were all, of course, Teachers Group-owned operations.
Holland House [registered in Jersey] had offices in Poland and was run by a Teachers Group member named Allan Foighel, and handled clothes sales all over Eastern Europe – Romania, Russia, Hungary etc. (Allan Foighel today runs Garson and Shaw in the USA).
Agence Notre Dame [registered in the UK] was also a ‘sales office’ exporting clothes to East Europe.
Transco Shipping [registered in Guernsey] handled exports to west Africa – Togo, Benin and Ghana (for some reason – quite why these kind of ‘surplus’ clothes still went to Africa is a mystery).
Each sales office had their own customers in various parts of the world. In some cases (such as in west Africa and central Asia) these were also Teachers Group-operated companies – mostly known as ‘Trade Link’. Others were genuine independent retailers.
Now here is the key thing. All three of these ‘sales offices’ used fake or misleading letterheads. None of the companies were actually registered in Holland, but they all had letterheads printed with an Amsterdam telephone number, an Amsterdam mailbox address (not a real office, just a mailbox), and an overseas bank account – Holland House’s was in Jersey.
So when they raised an invoice, the money would be paid into the overseas bank account, not to charity. In fact, none of the three sales offices raised their own invoices or paperwork for the sales they made to customers at all. I did it for them using the fake letterheads.
My job was to write the invoices on their behalf in Amsterdam, using the letterheads I was given. I would send the original to the customer, as if it had come from the sales office, with a copy to UFF or Humana.
Then I would arrange transport for the clothes direct from, say, UFF in Sweden to a company in Warsaw, or from Humana to, I suppose, somewhere like Latvia.
The customers got the clothes, and the price they paid was quite normal. But everything was structured so that neither UFF / Humana nor EC trading made much profit on these deals – the big profits were taken by the three sales offices and sent to their Jersey bank accounts.
The banks and account numbers were changed regularly – which I suppose all fits in.
Out of curiosity, I once visited all three addresses of the “Amsterdam based” sales offices on the letterheads. All three turned out to be nothing more than independent secretarial service offices, that received mail and some telephone calls and forwarded everything on to my office.
Most of the fixed phone lines we used came in through a re-route, though I don’t know from where.
However you looked at it, the profits went back to Tvind in Denmark, but the biggest profits were made with companies registered in the places where the least possible tax was paid, for example in Poland, and that is what went to the foreign bank accounts – not to Humana or UFF.
There was a second scam involving split invoices used by EC Trading. This involved writing two invoices for each consignment, splitting the bill into 50-50, or 40-60. Then only one part of the bill would be sent with the goods. When EC Trading exported to Hungary, for example, customs would only be presented with one of the two documents, so only a proportion of the duty was paid.
This went on in various countries for about 5 years.
Eventually customs and tax authorities in several countries (Holland, Belgium and Hungary) grew suspicious and the network had to be folded up.
Gustafsson fled to Nairobi, Kenya, with his crony Birgit Dinesen. There they started yet another sales office called Holland Trading (this company also worked in Budapest) to capture the market for clothes in Kenya and Tanzania. But this never worked well, and they eventually returned to Holland.
I left the company in 2000, and a few months later, EC Trading folded – went bankrupt. This was clearly anticipated, as for some time the company’s business had gradually been taken over by another enterpise - and that enterprise was - Garson & Shaw.
Garson and Shaw was a new company that took over the clothing business, first in London at a mailbox address, then in Gibraltar and the United States. All the business was moved over in around 2000.
EC Trading left large debts, but as most of these were to its Teachers Group trading partners, of course this just meant more money falling into Danish Tvind coffers.
In Gibraltar, Garson and Shaw shared a building with three other Tvind companies in the same block, each registered on a different street around the block and so each with a different postal address. I imagine the set up in Gibraltar was the same as everywhere else – secretarial services and accountants forwarding mail and phone calls.
In the end Gustafsson returned to Holland to found yet another Teachers Group used clothing enterprise called Conmore (what’s in a name!), and he also became the European representative of Garson and Shaw.
Strangely enough, the Dutch authorities never apprehended him.
None of these network of companies now exist – they have all stopped trading (although some of the Trade Link companies in for example Almaty and Kiev might still exist). But Garson and Shaw is still in business in the USA.
What were these people like? Well, there were some odd things about the people running the show, as well as the business. Everywhere I looked, I noticed there always seemed to be a Dane in charge, always with his own private phone and fax (this was in the pre-mobile phone era – remember that?)
There was something not very businesslike about them, strange as that may seem. They were all very intelligent people but a bit absent minded, “not quite of this world”. They were all single, not in any relationship – they all appeared completely “neutered”. And they all had a glassy, brainwashed look in their eyes, and did nothing but work, work, work.
Looking back, I suspect they were from the lower ranks of Tvind recruits. They reminded me of the kind of unattractive, needy children who have been bullied at school, and desperately want to belong to something, anything. Perhaps that’s why they were selected.
That’s my story.
‘Whistleblower’
See also:
Hot Money: The clothes laundry in Gibraltar
Berlingske Tidende, ‘The Used Clothing Trophy’, 2002
Do you have a story? Tell us.
Posted: 10th November 2009, revised 1st March 2010
