Last week, the former chairman of the company that controlled The 13 Hotel project in Macau was arrested in a hotel room in Phuket, Thailand. Peter Lee Coker Jr. was detained on charges that he and two others manipulated the stocks of two companies, Hometown International and E-Waste Corp.
According to the Bangkok Post, in 2019, Coker and partners set the former company’s initial public offering (IPO) price at $.25, then hired stock traders to jack up the presumed value to $12.99, an increase of more than 930 percent.
The arrest was conducted by joint forces of the Thai police and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Coker is charged with stock fraud, manipulation of securities trading and related offenses.
When it was first planned, the $1.6 billion 13 was touted as Macau’s most opulent hotel, with 30,000-square-foot suites, butler service and a fleet of red Rolls Royce Phantoms to accommodate VIPs. It opened in September 2018, but by 2021 had filed for bankruptcy. According to Macau Business, the company behind the luxury casino, South Shore, is now in liquidation.
A September indictment from the U.S. Department of Justice charged Coker and his co-defendants with “large-scale market manipulation” along with “conspiracy to commit securities fraud, securities fraud, and conspiracy to manipulate securities prices.”
Coker’s father, Peter Sr., was also named in the indictment, along with James Patten, who also faces four counts of manipulation of securities, four counts of wire fraud and one count of money laundering.
