Legal action against the Voyager Group of Companies has begun in the Bermuda Supreme Court.

On Thursday, four writs were filed against four Voyager companies in the matter of the Companies Act. These included Voyager Securities Ltd., Voyager Management (Bermuda) Ltd., Voyager Financial Services Ltd. and Voyager International Venture Alliance Ltd. Two directors of the Voyager Group, Paul Lemmon and Andrew Proctor were arrested and indicted earlier this month on fraud charges along with 58 other businessmen. It followed a lengthy US and Canadian undercover operation codenamed Bermuda Short.

Mr. Lemmon, 39, a former employee of the Bank of NT Butterfield, was named in three separate indictments while Mr. Proctor was named in two.

Both are charged with securities fraud, mail fraud and wire fraud, according to court papers obtained by The Royal Gazette.

The undercover operation, according to court papers, involved cooperating witnesses and an undercover Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) agent in Florida. The agent posed as a corrupt securities trader for a fictitious stock mutual fund on behalf of a number of investors who had invested approximately $800 million in the fund.The criminal allegations made against the men date from early December, 1999 through to this year. The first indictment names Mr. Lemmon, the founder and managing director of Bermuda based investment company Voyager Group Ltd. and a former employee of the Bank of Butterfield.

Also named is Mark Valentine, the former head of now bankrupt Toronto brokerage Thomson Kernaghan and Co., and the director of a number of Bermuda based companies including VC Advantage (Bermuda) Fund Ltd. and the Hammock Group Ltd. Mr. Valentine was allegedly the majority shareholder of three companies C-ME-Run, SoftQuad Software and JagNotes.com that were traded on an over-the-counter market.

The indictment charged that Mr. Lemmon and Mr. Valentine conspired to sell stock in the companies to the fictitious fund for a total of $29.4 million in return for a kickback payment of $7.8 million. The other two indictments are against Mr. Lemmon and Mr. Proctor and allege that the men had conspired to participate in other illegal kickback schemes through the same fictitious fund.