Liquidators haven't been able to locate or talk to Stephen Macaskill, the former CEO of Dasset, since day three of their investigation, which they opened just over a year ago.
Liquidators haven't been able to locate or talk to Stephen Macaskill, the former CEO of Dasset, since day three of their investigation, which they opened just over a year ago.
Where in the world is Stephen Macaskill?
To the frustration of former account holders with failed Auckland cryptocurrency exchange Dasset, that remains the $64,000 question - or, at least, the $6.3 million question.
Liquidators David Ruscoe and Russell Moore (both of Grant Thornton) believe former CEOMacaskill is the only person who knew how key Dasset systems worked - and could have vital information about the missing account holders’ funds.
But after brief initial contact, Ruscoe and Moore haven’t been able to locate or talk to Macaskill since day three of their investigation, which they opened just over a year ago.
“Unfortunately we have no news as to his location and he hasn’t responded to our various attempts to contact him. We are still assisting the Serious Fraud Office and Financial Markets Authority with their investigations,” Moore told the Herald.
He believes Macaskill is overseas.The liquidators’ efforts to trace him continue.
Stephen Macaskill's LinkedIn profile picture.
At the time of Dassets collapsed, the Herald visited the address Macaskill had filed with the Companies Office. The building manager said he had left three months ago.
With no major progress on the missing funds, the key development since the first six monthly report delivered in March was Moore and Ruscoe’s bid for legal clarification on a key legal point.
In July, the liquidators applied to the High Court at Wellington for legal directions on whether recovered crypto assets should be held in trust for Dasset’s users or if they should be for known creditors. A date for the hearing has yet to be set.
Dasset was placed in liquidation on August 15 last year after shareholders - who allege they were misinformed by Macaskill - discovered an unexplained shortfall in funds. The move came after months of customers complaining - to Dasset and authorities including the FMA - that they could not access or transfer funds, and that attempts to contact Dasset went answered.
In their first report, on August 21, Ruscoe and Moore found the equivalent of around $6.3m in cryptocurrency unaccounted for - the difference between what Dasset customers thought they had in their digital wallets, some $6.9m, and the digital currency actually on hand, which was around $600,000.
Fraud investigation
The liquidators contacted the SFO and FMA - which both opened investigations - after they discovered suspicious activity including a series of “unexplained withdrawals”.
Yesterday, an FMA spokeswoman said, “The FMA referred those matters most relevant to the SFO. There are still some issues FMA is looking into, but we cannot comment further.”
An SFO spokesman said, “No further information can be given at this stage, including detail regarding the investigation and whether a prosecution is likely to eventuate.”
Expenses mount
In a WhatsApp group formed by Dasset account holders, some expressed frustration, others were fatalistic.
One noted that liquidators’ total costs - $248,427 for the previous six-month period, and $109,369 for this one (including $95,104 in accrued but not yet billed fees) now equate to more than half the funds recovered.
Today’s report said there were no secured creditors, two preferential creditors - employees owed $47,304 and IRD owed $150,932 in PAYE and GST - and unsecured creditors’ claims totalling $293,017. Unsecured creditors include OriginID, an Auckland maker of onboarding software that terminated its contract with Dasset seven months before the liquidation over unpaid bills.
Account holders who lost access to their funds spanned from a solo mother of two who told the Herald she had $40,000 in cryptocurrency with Dasset - her life savings - to a sophisticated investor who had worked in investment banking.
The liquidators had been in contact with an unnamed offshore, third-party exchange, which was described as co-operative, providing transactional data that has helped their ongoing investigations.
Total liabilities are still listed as “unknown”.
“We anticipate the shortfall to be significant, with potentially less than 10% of customer liabilities covered by digital assets the company claims to have held at our appointment,” Ruscoe and Moore say in their latest report.
“Mentally, I’ve accepted that my funds are gone,” one Dasset customer said on the WhatsApp group this afternoon.
Earlier, investor and former director Fran Strajnar told the Herald he was also trying to locate Macaskill, to no avail.
Strajnar, a member of the Reserve Bank’s Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) Forum, quit as a director in May last year and relocated to El Salvador the same month.
He told the Herald he moved because he was attracted to the Central American country’s pro-Bitcoin stance. He had been unaware of the alleged wrongdoing by Macaskill.
As an investor he had lost money, he said.
Strajnar is a major shareholder in crypto investment firm Techemy, which had a 38% holding in Dasset, making it the second largest shareholder after Macaskill with his 40% stake.
Macaskill sent a single text to the Herald in response to questions left on voice mail and email, in which he blamed Dasset’s loss of banking services in January 2023 for its eventual collapse.
Pack a lunch
Ruscoe and Moore are already keenly aware that a crypto exchange liquidation can be complicated, and long-running.
The pair are also the liquidators for Christchurch crypto exchange Cryptopia, which was placed in liquidation in May of 2019, following an alleged hack in January of that year where around 9% of the firm’s assets went missing.
The liquidators’ efforts have been complicated by the discovery that customers’ funds were “co-mingled” by Cryptopia rather than actually stored in individual digital wallets, employee theft, and various (successful) legal bids by Ruscoe and Moore to sell some of the recovered cryptocurrency to fund the ongoing liquidation (last September, they won the right to sell another $5m worth of Bitcoin), among other legal issues.
In the latest High Court decision, released on March 1 following a November 13, 2023, hearing, Justice Palmer ruled that December 31, 2024, would be the final cut-off date for customers to register payment details with the liquidator for the eventual payout.
Cryptocurrency is an unregulated financial product in New Zealand.
Shortly after Dasset collapsed, now Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Andrew Bayly said: “Clearly there needs to be more oversight and regulatory clarity. But neither do we want Kiwis to miss out on the opportunities that cryptocurrency and associated technologies like blockchain can provide.”
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.
