Evidence Against David Baazov Under Question

The mounting evidence against David Baazov goes under question

David Baazov has found himself in the center of a major scheme investigation where he has been accused of being involved with insider trading, which is highly illegal and shady. Baazov has recited his innocent over and over, and Quebec’s security watchdog claims that it doesn’t actually have any direct evidence that shows that he is guilty but is rather using pieces of messages that make it appear as if these types of deals occurred that involved several major company takeovers.

The original report of the accusations comes out of the Globe and Mail newspaper, which announced that Baazov was being charged with involvement within a group of several people where they had earned a collective $1.1 million through stock trading from tips that were provided by Baazov that reach back six years. Some of these trades included Amaya’s buyout of Cryptologic Limited as well as the company’s takeover of Chartwell Technology Inc. This also included WMS’s buyout of Scientific Games.

Inside company information was given out by Baazov over to his brother Josh Baazov as well as a fellow business partner Craig Levett. These two would share the information with other people, with their compensation being 10% of any net profits that were raked in through these inside deals.

Baazov is considered the big boss of Amaya as he holds over 24.5 million shares in the company, which means that he holds more stake in the company than any other stakeholder. This accounts for about 17% of the company’s total stock. Baazov had decided to take a leave of absence back in March without pay. The investigation being conducted through the Autorite Des Marches Financiers is reporting that they believe that the stakeholder may have been involved in as many as seven deals in which he provided inside trade secrets for stock advantages.

On Wednesday there was a cross-examination conducted on Baazov’s lawyer, which led to Xavior Saint-Pierre of Autorite Des Marches Financiers reporting that they only held circumstantial evidence of three of the seven accused inside trade deals that they are currently investigating. This is the first time that the evidence being presented against Mr. Baazov was tested, and it showed that there will clearly be some difficulty with prosecuting Baazov as there really isn’t a whole lot of evidence to go on that would show that he was directly involved in inside trading deals. While there are certainly messages that might imply this, nothing is concrete.

Some of the evidence being used against Baazov includes phone calls that he made as well as emails between him and the other alleged members of the group. However, during the cross examination Saint-Pierre admitted that they didn’t actually have any clue what was stated in those phone calls and only know the timestamps and who was called. Some of the calls were short enough that they weren’t even sure if the parties had even communicated but instead just hung up.

The prosecution has a long ways to go in order to find Baazov guilty, which at this point it’s starting to seem unlikely.