The Tribune

By RASHAD ROLLE

Tribune Staff Reporter

rrolle@tribunemedia.net

MICHAEL Cox, the former Renew Bahamas CEO fighting allegations in court of working without a work permit, is facing a new court action alleging he defrauded a Bahamian contractor with whom he went into business in 2016.

His co-defendants are James Owen, a chartered accountant and Myles Laroda, a lawyer and chairman of the Public Disclosures Commission.

Ronald Miller, 69, is suing them for $595,000 and wants the Supreme Court to restrain them from taking possession of machinery and equipment for their joint business venture.

The lawsuit is among several Mr Cox has faced since his time as CEO of Renew Bahamas, the failed venture that attempted to remediate the New Providence Landfill under the Christie administration.

Renew Bahamas’ contract was terminated shortly after Hurricane Matthew in 2016 when the company invoked its contract’s force majeure clause.

Mr Miller alleges in his affidavit filed last week that shortly after Renew Bahamas ceased operations at the landfill, Mr Cox sought his partnership in a new venture intended to carry on Renew Bahamas’ metals recycling business with its trading partner, Ferrous Processing & Trading Company, a US company.

Mr Miller said he agreed to a 60 percent beneficial interest in the company. The lawsuit portrays the three defendants as taking advantage of Miller and his seeming lack of sophistication in dealing with the management and financial side of the business despite bringing most of the resources to the table.

Mr Miller said he was responsible for managing the production and processing of recycled materials while Mr Cox was responsible for managing “sales contracts, export documentation, and general accounting functions.”

The pair did not immediately finalise the formalities of the company, citing “chaos in the aftermath of Hurricane Matthew,” according to Mr Miller.

They did, however, begin operation on October 9, 2016, shipping a container of recycled cars on October 11 of that year, he said.

It was only in December 2016 that Bostwick Law Partners incorporated Bahamas Processing & Trading Company Ltd and BPT Assets Co LTD.

Mr Miller said he “incurred all the financial strain and burden to fully support” the venture but only received his first pay, $1,900, on January 15, 2017.

“At this point,” he alleged, “I had already processed $168,000. Mr Cox told me that Ferrous Processing and Trading Co was wiring him the venture’s sales proceeds and then he would wire partial amounts of those funds from his US Bank of America account. I explained to Mr Cox that I had already funded all of the venture’s expenses of well over $77,000 and that $1,900 he wired from his Bank of America account in Florida was short of meeting the ongoing operational expenses I was paying.

“… I had neither visibility to the final export invoices of the venture nor visibility of the payments that Mr Cox was receiving against those invoices into his Bank of America account. Mr Cox and his wife, Christel Cox, had sole control and custody of all those transactions.”

Mr Miller said Mr Cox told him early on that some of the proceeds were needed to pay debt owed to Renew Bahamas’ creditors and Ferrous Processing, with whom he had a personal debt.

It wasn’t until February 2018, according to Mr Miller, that Mr Cox brought Mr Owen and Mr Laroda on board.

He said Mr Cox told him he wanted to include the two men as his personal representatives and that he did not have government’s approval to legally own any shares of the venture.

At the company’s first board of directors meeting, Mr Miller said he signed documents granting himself and Mr Owen 2.5 shares in the company. He said he did this even though he believed this did not represent his total ownership of the venture since by that point he already invested over $350,000 of his own cash to support the payroll of the company and produced “over 402 containers of recycled cars weighing over 9,701 tons with an approximate value of $2.3m.”

He and Mr Owen opened a Commonwealth Bank account for the company in March, he said, and he believed both their signatures were required for all bank transactions.

However, he soon became concerned the defendants were depleting the company’s funds.

Mr Cox had instructed him to sign $50,000 cheques for his children to attend Lyford Cay International School and $6,000 cheques for his monthly beach house rental at Eves Cable Beach, he alleged.

Later, he claims Mr Owen “unilaterally announced” to him he would pay himself a weekly salary of $1,500. Between these events, he said he became concerned enough to ask his daughters to help him get a grip on the company’s finances.

Yet on a work site in May, he said he signed a document Mr Cox brought to him without the aid of his reading glasses.

“It was not represented nor did I appreciate this encounter with Mr Cox to be a formal meeting enjoined by the company to elect additional directors or conduct any formal business of the company,” he said.

“Mr Cox was not a director and not a shareholder of the company so I did not anticipate or expect that Mr Cox would be handing me a document pertaining to the formal arrangement of the company.”

Mr Miller said he became disturbed on October 27 when he found Mr Cox’s name listed on a delivery ticket for scrap metal that came from Crystal Palace’s demolition site and was intended for Larry Burrow’s Manpower yard.

Because no one was present at Mr Burrow’s business location on the evening when a Bahamas Waste truck delivered the material, Mr Miller said he learned of this arrangement the next morning when a Bahamas Waste driver came to BPT’s office off Cowpen Road to have someone sign off on the delivery ticket. He said he only later learned the transaction was part of a joint-venture agreement between BPT, Manpower and Lenova, the contractor managing the Crystal Palace demolition, and was not included in discussions to implement the joint venture. 

He said he discovered around that time his signature was no longer required for processing cheques at Commonwealth Bank because Mr Owen had removed him from BPT’s account. Tensions soared, but he said the men were unable to resolve their issues during a heated meeting they had at Mr Laroda’s law from on November 2. 

Mr Miller said: “On the 4th of November 2018, I went to service the Lefort shear car crushing equipment which had been on the Manpower yard at the landfill since October 2016. Upon entering the yard - as I had done over the past two years - Mr Burrows informed me that Mr Cox instructed him not to allow me to enter the property. I wrote an email informing both Mr Owen and Mr Laroda that I was denied access to the BPT worksite located in the premise of Mr Burrow’s yard.”

Later, Mr Miller said he discovered that Mr Owen “issued a non-sufficient funds BPT payroll cheque” to someone in the amount of $300 drawn from the BPT Commonwealth Bank account.

“Mr Owen knew he had already intentionally overdrawn this account and knew this payroll cheque would bounce,” he alleged.

He said a few days later Mr Owen brought police to BPT’s business place, demanding keys to the equipment. But after declaring himself president, director and shareholder of the company, police left, having determined it was a civil matter. A similar event was repeated eight days later.

On November 13, Mr Miller said he was told by a teller at Commonwealth Bank that BPT’s account, which held $37,000 the previous week, had been withdrawn by Mr Owen and was now overdrawn.

He said he never received a full accounting of the company’s financial transactions, bank statements, cash flow statements, assets and liabilities, profit & loss statement or trial balance.

“The actions of Mr Cox, Mr Owen and Mr Laroda in recent months, perpetrated deliberate acts to purposely usurp my right of ownership as the majority shareholder of the venture and subject companies,” he said. “Their actions were deliberate and with intent to defraud and deny me my rightful authority and investment rights in the venture and subject companies, and to illegally force me out of my own business which I started with my personal resources.”

Mr Miller said he has suffered “significant loss and damage as a result of the malicious behaviour of Mr Cox, Mr Owen and Mr Laroda and their naked usurpation of my rights as the owner of the business interest in my companies BPT and BPTA.”