A court in the United States has appointed an official to examine the financial affairs of convicted fraudster Greg Lindberg, the former US billionaire whose investment group acquired Irish medtech group Clanwilliam in 2014.
Lindberg (45) pleaded guilty before Christmas to fraud and money laundering involving €2 billion (€1.9 billion) arising from his misuse of insurance money to go on an investment spree in the US and around the world.
He used an investment vehicle called Eli Global or Global Growth, and a web of affiliated companies, to invest hundreds of millions of euros in business ventures. Among the firms used was an Irish company, Triton Financial, which was incorporated in October 2013 and used to invest in businesses in Ireland, the UK, Denmark, Australia and New Zealand. It has not filed accounts since 2017 but remains on the Irish register of companies.
Among the investments made by Triton was the reported €45 million paid in late 2014 for Helix Health, a medtech company established by Irish entrepreneur Howard Beggs. Helix became the Clanwilliam Group, and now includes subsidiaries in the UK, New Zealand and Australia.
It is the main supplier of electronic patient record software used by Irish general practitioners, had a turnover of almost €96 million in 2023 according to its latest filed accounts, and employs more than 1,000 people.
A spokeswoman for the group said it was no longer owned by Lindberg’s Global Growth. A UK-based trust, the Clanwilliam Group Trust, was established in November 2020 “so that there would be a complete change of control and ownership of Clanwilliam at that time,” she said. “Since November 4th, 2020, Clanwilliam companies are not affiliate companies [of Global Growth] and are not subsidiaries of Global Growth.”
According to numerous court filings in the US, Lindberg not only improperly used insurance funds to make business investments, he also used money from his insurance businesses to pay for multiple residences, a superyacht, a private jet, and a practice whereby he paid women to donate their eggs, which he fertilised and had implanted in surrogate mothers who signed legal documents forgoing any rights over the children.
Lindberg has 12 children, three from his former marriage and the rest apparently by way of in-vitro fertilisation. He is in jail awaiting sentencing.
In 2019, he was charged in North Carolina with wire fraud and bribery. In 2020, he was convicted and jailed, two years later he was released after a successful appeal on legal grounds, and last year he was retried and again convicted. Separately, in Florida, he pleaded guilty in December to fraud and money laundering concerning the “misuse” of about $2 billion in insurance funds.
The court in North Carolina has appointed bankruptcy attorney Joseph Grier to work with a team charged with seeking to unwind Lindberg’s financial empire and reimburse insurance companies and their clients who are at a loss because of Lindberg’s activities.
Lindberg has entered into a plea agreement and pledged to take all reasonable steps to secure assets to pay restitution to policyholders of his insurance companies.
In June 2019, several insurance companies owned by Lindberg were placed in rehabilitation by order of the courts in North Carolina and since then regulators have been working to unwind the complex financial web of companies and bank accounts he controlled.
The spokeswoman for Dublin-based Clanwilliam said Lindberg “has no shareholding in Clanwilliam Headquarters Ltd/the Clanwilliam Group. Matters relating to Clanwilliam’s shareholding are a matter of public record and all filings in the [Companies Registration Office] are up to date,” she said.
According to the 2023 accounts, the ultimate parent of the group is a UK investment holding trust. “H Steven Wilson serves as the Trustee and Howard Beggs and Gerry Hunt are the ultimate controlling parties of the group. The ultimate beneficiary of the trust is R Gaddy.”
Beggs was the Irish founder of the medtech group and Hunt is the group’s chief financial officer. The trustee is Hugh Wilson, a retired partner in US law firm Latham & Watkins, with an address in Denver, Colorado, while Gaddy is Robert Boylan Gaddy, a US businessman and sometime associate of Lindberg.
Gaddy is a director of a security company in North Carolina called Apex International that was involved in monitoring women being considered as potential egg donors for children to be fathered by Lindberg.
In a statement in October 2019 in response to an article in the Wall Street Journal, Gaddy said Lindberg hired Apex “to look closely at the lives of potential egg donors to make sure they were safe and healthy – something any parent should understand”.
In a video uploaded on YouTube by Lindberg in December of last year, he said his decision to have more children came after he was sentenced to seven years in jail in 2020 for attempting to bribe an insurance commissioner in North Carolina.
“The prosecutor said that he wanted to ‘incapacitate Greg Lindberg’ – so I thought what better way to deny him that satisfaction than to have a large, beautiful family,” he said.
During his time in prison, Lindberg became a wellness guru. In another video on YouTube, uploaded by Lindberg 11 months ago, Gaddy said chronic health issues he had long suffered from disappeared after he began following Lindberg’s anti-ageing programme.
Attempts to contact Wilson and Gaddy were not successful. Sources said Gaddy is no longer named as a beneficiary of the trust. The trust is not a publicly registered entity and it was not possible to submit queries to it. A request for a comment from Grier met with no response.
