Gerald Thomas Liddle is a canadian businessman who came from a little town in Canada and deceived former ministers, investors and profesionals in five countries, including Colombia. Gerry, as he is called, is a green modern pirate. His swindle is based upon the buoyant global market of carbon credits, which generated, in 2021, $84 billion dollars in revenue.
Liddle has a very poor spanish, 58 years, blond hair and has been promising for more than a decade millions to naive and experts of that market with an idea that he sells as an environmental revolution. Yet, it’s all smoke and mirrors.
“This guy behaved as a thug. I don’t know exactly what he did but he misbehaved badly and stole the job of many people, including me”, says Frank Pearl, former Minister of the Environment, presidencial candidate and Peace Agreement negotiator with FARC. Pearl did not refer to the monetary agreement he had with Liddle, but some records say Liddle owes him $56 millon pesos (COP).
Besides Pearl, a mining company and 13 colombians were scammed, most of them professionals from Bogotá coming from elite universities with skilled profiles. In total, Liddle left a debt in salaries, rent and what he stole from investors that amounts to $2.200 millon pesos (Aproximately 600 thousand USD).
While he was in Colombia, between April and May 2022, he had a life of luxury and excess. In the penthouse he rented in Rosales, an upper class neighborhood in Bogotá, Rodrigo Vivas — who was also scammed — remembers that the doorman in the apartment building once told him: “Mr. Rodrigo, we have a situation here with Mr. Liddle because he wants to get into the building with five prostitutes and this is not allowed here”.
This investigation reveals that what happened in Colombia is part of a larger pattern of scam that extends for more than five countries. With his promises, Liddle deceived investors in Canadá, United States, Dominican Republic and Haiti. His last swindle was in Colombia, and there are signs that he might be building another one, again, in the United States.
The promise of turning air into money
From the penthouse, whose rental price was $20 millon pesos per month, Gerry Liddle told his employees in Colombia that they had to make a list of the richest companies in the country to convince them of investing in his business idea. “What we need is money is what Gerry told us”, remembers Daniel Perry, an economist with a Master Degree at the University of Bordeaux, France.
Back then, October 2022, Liddle had resided in Colombia for seven months. He was able to recruit to his company, RainTree Global Holding, more than 10 people, among economists, designers and profiles in the environmental sector.
They all joined Liddle’s team thanks to a network of contacts that he builded throught Rodrigo Vivas, a businessman who was 37 at the time. He met Liddle thanks to mutual friends. Vivas had access to circles of power and money in Bogotá. His family owns the Hacienda San Rafael and the Centro Comercial San Rafael (two important social venues) located in the northern area of Bogotá.
Liddle recruited his team showing experience and knowledge in how to do a massive reforestation plan in Colombia, and competing in the carbon credits market.
The carbon credits market is a key piece of the global debate on climate change. Governments and companies have promoted them as a market alternative to offset emissions through the conservation and regeneration of forests capable of reducing global warming. The issue is controversial because its regulation is opaque, it is a business full of intermediaries, and the money it produces can have problematic impacts on local communities, which all of a sudden receive millions. Within that environmental skein, Liddle found a spot to move himself in a booming green business.
Even the pop superstar Taylor Swift anounced that to mitigate the contaminant impact of her private planes she would buy carbon credits.
Gerry’s model put a twist on this business: instead of protecting existing forests, the business was to plant them. The carbon credit market has been gaining strength in Colombia, because it is one of the countries with the most potential given that it has an area to preserve forests the size of France.
The promise to its employees was that they would earn millions of dollars, they would receive shares and their names would be in the credits of the project, one that was going to generate a huge social and environmental impact. “You are going to be millionaires if you are by my side,” Liddle told them in English, according to Vivas.
“When he talked about the project it sounded very nice, it gave the impression that it could really help people in Colombia and was not simply to make the canadian rich,” says Inés Mejía, who worked in the company creating renders of the biocenters where the trees would be planted.
Liddle arrived in Colombia spending lavishly. He spent money on restaurants, hotels and luxuries. This is how he built the illusion about the million-dollar business in the carbon market, and about key contacts in banks and investment funds that supposedly had their eyes on his project. That same facade was what he used to put together a high-profile team in Colombia.
The wealth that Liddle showed in Colombia, in reality, came from a recent scam initiated in the United States, before landing in Bogotá. Raintree Colombia was officially born on August 25, 2022. Although Liddle was the head of this business and RainTree Global Holding, the parent company, he did not sign any of the official papers.
“Gerry had to sign some powers of attorney, but he said that he would not sign anything in Spanish. That he could not appear in anything because he did not know what he was signing. And I said: ‘well, if I have to be the legal representative for this to move forward… let’s do it”, says Vivas.
Rodrigo Vivas not only appears as a legal representative but also as the sole shareholder of Raintree Colombia. But he did not took control of the bank account. It was Liddle the only one authorized to make financial transactions.
What Liddle promised was to plant millions of trees and plants with controlled climatic conditions to replant them where they were needed.
“Gerry used to tell investors that it was worth 80 million dolars, but in one ocassion he said that its real cost was 50 million dolars and that he intended to keep 30 million dolars for himself”, says Perry.
In Colombia, the former Minister of the Environment, Frank Pearl, was Liddle’s spearhead in the network of relationships that he managed to weave.
Pearl came to RainTree because he was a friend of Rodrigo Vivas’s father, and began acting as a public relations person. His work allowed him to link Liddle’s company with the Ministry of the Environment, non-governmental organizations and public and private companies with an interest in purchasing carbon credits.
Liddle had a bombastic speech. He used statements with the appearance of irrefutable truths. In the document in which he presented its proposal, labeled “confidential memorandum”, it stated that RainTree RainTree “began to position itself to enter into a Master Project Agreement with the Government of Colombia to develop a nationwide Programme for forest landscape restoration and carbon offset generation”. In reality, it was never close to concrete any public investment.
Months passed while Liddle lived the good life in Bogotá, but his speech began to tremble when he came face to face with his potential clients. It became vague and opaque in the details.
For example, Liddle managed to sit down with Petro’s then deputy environment minister, Sandra Vilardy, but nothing materialized. “As my grandmother said: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch”,” said Vilardy about the ideas she heard from Liddle at that meeting.
Carlos Cavelier, president of Alquería, met four times with Liddle; he even visited his home office. “He made himself known, he had a very innovative idea, and we thought it was a fantastic one, because Colombia has the capacity of selling amazing carbon credits, that is what we ought to do. The man insisted, and we said yes, very pretty indeed, but he thought that he could make business with his ID”, said the businessman.
Ecopetrol, Visión Amazonía and the Von Humboldt Institute all had similar histories.
But one investor did fall for the scam. Liddle convinced Colombian Natural Resources (CNR), a mining company that exploits open-pit thermal coal in the department of Cesar, of investing in his idea.
CNR hired RainTree to begin a 15-year project of the reforestation, which included restoring areas affected by the mine. The contract was a big ticket one: 200,000 dollars. Between September and October 2022, CNR paid 100,000 dollars to Liddle’s business.
Motivated by the success of that first deal, Liddle tasked his team in Colombia with making a list of the richest companies in the country. By then, RainTree Colombia had been operating for six months. Most employees had not received their payments, but none left because with CNR’s money some of what was owed to them was paid off.
At the turn of the year, Liddle announced that he was travelling to the United States and Canada to seek more money from the shareholders. It was scheduled to only be for two weeks. He never came back and left without planting a single tree.
Continental fraud
Before arriving in Colombia, Liddle had already left behind a string of scams in the United States. In 2021, he met Frank Salvati, a forensic accountant with experience in overseeing major projects in Canada, and Matt Beinke, a lawyer specializing in the development of emerging industries.
Beinke and Salvati said that they met Liddle because of common friends that knew of his promising project in the carbon credit market. When Liddle elaborated on his idea, they saw potential and dove in headfirst.
Beinke handled all the paperwork to pitch the idea of RainTree Global Holdings in the United States. “I invested my time and money in polishing [Liddle’s] presentation for different audiences. It’s not the same if you’re talking to the government, the investors or banks”.
Salvati was responsible for seeking financing in Canada. He brought the project to BlackRock, one of the biggest investment funds in the country and caught the attention of ScotiaBank. The former was the bank that Liddle said in Colombia that he had privileged access to. In addition, Salvati gave Liddle 50,000 dollars as initial capital.
Rodrigo Vivas, legal representative of RainTree in Colombia, claims that Liddle used Beinke and Salvati’s money to launch the project, maintain his lifestyle and, simultaneously, to sell the idea that he was a serious and well-backed businessman.
The fact that those two investors had put money and time into Liddle’s business proposal is explained, in part, by the involvement of other prestigiouss individuals who had shown interest in the project before.
“Emilio Seempris, one of the two authors of the reforestation chapter in the Paris Agreement, was part of the project. He joined before me and was already frustrated by the time I arrived at the project. So I met him briefly”, Salvati says.
Seempris is a former Minister of Environment of Panama and one of the worldwide most recognized authorities in the carbon credit market. His name and photo appear in an old RainTree brochure found among the files Liddle left in Colombia. In that document, he is introduced as the company’s vice president.
Even Charles Johnson, a famous former baseball player in the United States, is listed as an investor. But none of the people that crossed paths with the Canadian in Colombia ever met Liddle’s list of celebrities. Moreover, there are no public records indicating that they were ever associated with RainTree.
Liddle’s scam strategy is developed through a web of relationships. With the team he brought together in Colombia, Liddle also sought to enter Haiti.
Various documents show that he was on the brink of closing a deal with André Apaid, a controversial Haitian businessman that last year was declared “inadmissible” in Canada for promoting and sponsoring armed illegal groups in his country.
In a letter marked as “confidential,” there are details indicating that Liddle’s company offered Apaid a reforestation business which promised him billions of dollars in profits.
Apaid acted as Liddle’s intermediary to initiate discussions with the Haitian government. In essence, he played the same role as Frank Pearl in Colombia. And a very similar one as Frank Salvati in Canada and Matt Beinke in the States.
Although, according to those communications, a deal was in motion, from one day to another it was over.
Perry, the employee in Colombia that Liddle charged with making contacts with Haiti, explained that the change was sudden: “Gerry just said that Haiti was a poor country and that he was no longer interested in”. Apaid only answered regarding Liddle: “I cannot be of any help, as no financial or commercial transactions arose from our meeting”.
In September 2022, Liddle’s American partners, Salvati and Beinke, decided to step aside and take the time and money invested in RainTree as lost.
But Liddle never said that in Colombia. Here, employees, public relations representatives, and other associates continued to think that the foreign partners were on board and that Liddle was going to ask them for money on his end-of-year trip.
Liddle’s contacts in Colombia, the United States and Canada are not sure if Liddle is a cheat or if he is just a very bad businessman. But in Canada he has a record that shows that he is more than just a bad dealer and that he has scammed his partners and even this country’s government.
From Wawa to the world
The most extraordinary feature of Wawa, a town of 2,700 people in the province of Ontario, is a statue of a giant eight-meter goose. Gerald Liddle lived most of his life there, before his journey to the south.
Liddle found success in the 1980s and 1990s with his first company, called AquaNorth Farms. He planted trees in Wawa with money given by the Canadian government and the promise that the business would generate employment.
What was then a thriving business in Canada, ended up in a court order that stripped Liddle of control from the company. The details were exposed because Liddle did not paid taxes or social security to his employees. A similar pattern to the one in Colombia.
There are records that Liddle wrote checks and spent money lying to banks with the promise that his lead investor would give him more money. At the same time, the investor testified that Liddle lied about the promise of a new investment and that, in fact, he did not allow him access to the accounting books, cut off communication when he asked for accounts and even disappeared certain files.
Liddle’s letter of introduction to Colombia, the United States, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic is the successfull story of AquaNorth. But because that company ended up having different legal troubles, Liddle attributed the tree planting in Canada to another company he created much later, in 2005, called Global Forest Care.
Then, Liddle founded RainTree Corporation, the first version of the company in which he began to convince naive people on the rest of the continent. It was introduced in Canada as a “firm with an international approach and based in Wawa”, and the Canadian government gave him a funding of $650,000.
The only public trace of Rain Tree Corporation’s activities outside of Canada is in the Dominican Republic. In 2010, the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources announced the signing of an agreement with Liddle’s company and local organizations with the purpose of reforestation and listing on carbon credit markets. The Dominican Republic’s Ministry of Environment did not answer any questions about what happened to the announced project. There are no public reports that the project had been executed.
Liddle’s recent past even includes a scam to the remote town of Wawa. His ex-wife Tamara Liddle was a councilwoman, and he held a position as a public representative. Between the two of them, they accused the mayor and several officers of corruption when local media investigations reported accusations that the Liddles did not pay taxes.
The case was investigated, and it turned out that the Liddles’ allegations were unfounded. On top of that, it was proven that they evaded taxes and pressured town officials not to charge them.
For all the expenses caused to the municipality with the unfounded complaints, Wawa determined that the Liddles had to pay $280,000 In 2017, the municipality also ordered Gerald Liddle to “immediately stop presenting himself as a representative of the municipality.”
After going from hero to villain in his hometown, Liddle reappeared in 2019 with the creation of RainTree Global Holding in the United States, and registered it in Florida and Delaware, a tax haven.
Gerry’s Carbon Footprint in Colombia
Since leaving for the United States at the end of 2022, Liddle kept accumulating debt in Colombia. Many employees kept working, and the CNR mining company was waiting for the start of the project for which they had paid $100,000 to begin with.
The cost of the penthouse continued to increase its interests. According to a letter from the real estate company, by February 2023 the account totaled almost $200 million pesos.
Later, Rodrigo Vivas, who was the only person who signed on as RainTree Colombia’s legal representative, consulted the funds in the bank account. It only had $200,000 pesos. The rest of the money was gone.
June 2023 was the last chat Liddle had with the people who worked for RainTree Colombia. He went from his role as a friendly businessman to having a threatening tone with them, who in despair, began to contact the supposed US investors. Liddle wrote to the RainTree workers with orders not to send messages to the United States.
By September, all of the company emails were deactivated, and Liddle did not answer his WhatsApp chat again.
Frank Pearl called the businessmen he had contacted to warn them not to send money. “I told them what was happening. I told them one thing: if it was my money, I wouldn’t turn it over,” he said.
CNR’s vice president of sustainability, Alejandro Echavarría, said that the mining company decided to terminate the contract with RainTree Colombia for non-compliance.
The lawyers they hired to set up the company also did not receive payments. The same thing happened with a headhunter who was hired to look for more talents.
In September 2023, Rodrigo Vivas registered, at Bogotá Chamber of Commerce, a letter of resignation from the legal representation of RainTree Colombia in which he assures that it’s due to “the mistreatment and inconsistencies by the partners”. However, he is the only one who is registered as a partner because Liddle did not want to be named on papers.
In January 2024, Liddle reappeared and sent a WhatsApp audio in which he promised to come back to Colombia.
In this audio, Liddle dropped hints that his business model would live on elsewhere. Instead of talking about RainTree, he mentioned ForestCare. Recently, Liddle created a LinkedIn profile in which he identified himself as the “Chief Operating Officer” of ForestCare Global based in West Palm Beach, Florida. That’s the last known place Liddle was in.
On February 9, Vivas filed a complaint against Gerald Thomas Liddle for aggravated fraud in La Fiscalía General de la Nación (Attorney General’s Office). It is the only legal action against Liddle that has been taken in Colombia.
None of the people La Silla Vacía spoke to in Canada, the United States and Colombia know Liddle’s current whereabouts. Liddle did not return the messages or interview requests from La Silla Vacía.
The reporter Brenda Stockton, editor of the Canadian media outlet Wawa News, collaborated with La Silla Vacía in the reconstruction of Gerald Thomas Liddle’s entire past in Canada.
