This is an incredibly well-written and well-researched article about Concrete Equities – I’m not sure how I missed it when it was published in September 2009 (maybe because I was in new dad mode), but it’s worth a read for anyone involved in this debacle. This paragraph is particularly apt:
“Recently returned CEO Dave Jones played the absent founder; current president Vincenzo De Palma, whom you might recognize from Concrete’s TV ads, drew from a background mostly spent selling lumber out of Prince George, B.C.; 20-something executive Vinnie Aurora’s qualifications included being the son of a colleague of Jones; and, along with experience as an investment industry veteran, office manager Dave Humeniuk bore the albatross of a lifetime ban from selling real estate in the province of Alberta. The result: a corporate environment poisoned by infighting and finger-pointing and which produced no significant financial reporting, a lapsed mortgage, allegations of impropriety and incompetence, no dividends since the start of this year despite purportedly cash-positive properties, and, because of it all, more than 2,000 investors raring for a fight.”
If ever there was a cautionary tale for investors, this is it!
If for whatever reason the link above isn’t working, a copy of the article can be found here.
Jason – you should link to page 1. Starting on page 2 was very confusing.
Janak,
Whoops! Good catch, I didn’t realize I was linking to page two. Fixed. 🙂
Hi Jason, my name is Jon and I invested in the El Golfo project. I know that this is not the forum to ask questions regarding this subject perhaps, but I have tried contacitng Ernst & Young, along with searching the internet for answers, but to no result. Do you possibly know what is going on or whom to ask for concrete answers as to the status of our investment $$? (did ya like the pun?) Thanks a lot!
Jon,
Unfortunately there's not much to tell. Instead of using our money to purchase the land in Mexico like Concrete Equities told us they would, they instead used our money to put a down payment on a much larger piece of land – but when they failed to raise enough money to pay for the whole piece of land, they lost everything. Every dollar invested in Mexico is gone. We were lied to, and millions of dollars were lost as a result.