A SELF-APPOINTED crown prince of a non-existent Pacific island tricked two Hong Kong banks into opening false accounts in a bizarre fraud, a court heard yesterday.
Austrian Gerhard Bacher, 22, allegedly visited a number of top banks in the territory, promoting himself as head of the 'Dominion of Melchizedek'.
The 'S. H. K. Prince Gerald-Dennis Sayn-Wittgenstein-Hohenstein' - the title Bacher was said to have used to give instructions to banks - appeared in Eastern Court yesterday wearing ordinary jeans and a blue T-shirt.
He is facing two charges of procuring an entry in the records of banks in Hong Kong by deception.
The court was told Bacher first opened a Citi-plus account at Citibank's Queen's Road Central branch on February 15 with a cheque for $318,980, purporting to be from a Melchizedek bank.
But investigators discovered that the bank, which went under the name Asia-Pacific, was not licensed in the territory, the court heard.
Commercial Crime Bureau Detective Senior Inspector Alex Tan, representing the Crown, told the court the scam was repeated two weeks later.
