Pauline Cousins was found guilty in December 2009 of “furnishing false information” and was sentenced to 21 months in prison after a referral from the SFC to the police’s Commercial Crime Bureau brought a conviction. She has now been banned for life from re-entering the industry.
It was found that between 2002 and 2006, Cousins produced four false portfolio valuation summaries to a client, which in fact belonged to other clients.
Cousins used the false valuations to mislead the client in to believing he had invested a lump sum of $1.75m in an investment-linked assurance scheme. Instead Cousins had, without her client’s authority, invested the lump sum in the shares of a hi-tech company which was subsequently put into administration.
The SFC said it revoked Crown Asset Management’s licence in February 2006, after the allegations first emerged.
According to an entry on the Hong Kong Association of Business and Professional Women’s website, Cousins established Crown Asset Management in 1993.
She is named as a speaker at the Association’s 2004 AGM at which she described beginning her career in the UK, establishing an offshore business in Gibraltar in the late 1980s and taking a number of roles in the Middle East and then later the Far East, including Hong Kong and Tokyo.
