Financiers David and Antoinette Bolden stole more than $360,000 from a company they part-owned to pay debts and maintain their lifestyle amid “extreme financial pressure”, a prosecutor alleged.The husband and wife used money siphoned from Emerald Capital International [ECI] to pay credit cards and their son's private school fees as their other investment companies were failing, according to Crown counsel Susan Mulligan.Other stolen cash allegedly covered bank overdrafts and propped up the failing companies in order to retain their Bermuda Monetary Authority [BMA] licences.Opening the trial at Supreme Court yesterday, Ms Mulligan described this as “a desperate attempt to keep their businesses and licences afloat,” by “two relatively young dynamic people who had businesses and wanted to live a certain lifestyle”.She alleged the Boldens perpetrated the theft by denying two overseas partners in ECI, Canadians John Wright and Jason Bagg, access to online banking records and financial statements.Mr Bolden, 48, and Mrs Bolden, 47, deny 18 charges of stealing $316,402 from ECI, six charges of laundering $73,000 and one charge of filing misleading information to the BMA.Ms Mulligan told the jury the couple, from Harrington Sound Road, Hamilton Parish, agreed to handle the day-to-day operations of ECI, which was a Bermuda-registered company.Canada-based partners Mr Wright and Mr Bagg attracted overseas investors who provided money to ECI.Some went towards a mutual fund named the Explorer Fund, which focused on Canadian mining, oil and gas exploration ventures.The rest was invested in ECI as a company in its own right.Ms Mulligan said Mr Bagg had experience acting as an agent with small mining companies and Mr Wright was an investment advisor for Canadian expatriates around the world.Meanwhile Mr Bolden was “well-known in the investment community” in Bermuda and Canada as he operated a number of financial services companies in Bermuda under the umbrella of Emerald Financial Group.His wife was a chartered accountant who, as chief financial officer of ECI, was responsible for the bookkeeping. The pre-existing Emerald Financial Group companies all held investment business licences as required under Bermuda law, and were overseen by the BMA.However, the new company, ECI, was “entirely separate” from that group, with different ownership, and did not need such a licence according to Ms Mulligan. She explained this was because “it could only take investments from high net-worth individuals” and institutional investors.The rationale behind such exempt companies is that they cater to sophisticated investors and do not need BMA oversight. That meant the BMA never regulated ECI. Ms Mulligan said the planned mutual fund, named the Explorer Fund, did not get off the ground because the economic crisis meant the Canadian oil, gas and mining industry was no longer a viable investment option. The money was returned to the investors.However, Mr Wright and Mr Begg also raised $1.2 million from investors who wished to invest in ECI itself. When the Explorer Fund failed to get started, ECI began to look into a new wireless technology company called SweRaCom. “It looked like an investment that might be a great way to make money during the economic downturn,” explained Ms Mulligan.A total of $200,000 was invested in buying equipment and setting up the company, with the understanding that all four partners in ECI would benefit.However, the prosecutor said: “Things began to go wrong when Mr Bolden began to move forward in other directions with this wireless technology.“He set up two new companies without his other partners; Bolden Bermuda and Bolden International.”Those two companies continued to move forward with the plan without the participation of the Canadian ECI partners, even though ECI spent $200,000 on the equipment. “While this was going on, Mr and Mrs Bolden's other companies were not doing well. They were in the red for the most part.“Their bank accounts were at the high end of their credit limits, their personal credit limits were maxed out, yet they continued to live a lifestyle that was well beyond their means,” said the prosecutor.The Boldens also needed money to satisfy BMA concerns that there was a shortfall in capital in their other companies.“The BMA began to put pressure on the Boldens to prove they had the capital available to continue to hold those investment licences,” said Ms Mulligan. “The Boldens reassured the BMA they did have money that it was sitting in an ECI account. That was the money provided by investors for ECI, but they claimed it was unencumbered and they could use it to capitalise their other companies that were in trouble. That just wasn't true.”The prosecutor continued: “That wasn't appropriate because they didn't have the ability to get that money. However, money started to be siphoned from the ECI bank account.”Ms Mulligan said the Boldens stole funds between November 2008 and January 2009 in increments of $10,000 at a time, as only one signature was needed to authorise spending amounts up to that total.For amounts over $10,000, a signature was needed from one of the Canadian partners as well as one of the Boldens.The couple allegedly removed up to $60,000 per day from the ECI accounts and put it in other accounts without the knowledge of the other partners. "What began happening at this time of extreme financial pressure on the Boldens was the way one could access the accounts was changed by Mrs Bolden,” explained Ms Mulligan.“One could normally access the accounts online with a password; that's how, up until that point the Canadian partners could see what was going on with the bank accounts and what was being spent. But Mrs Bolden or the bank changed it to a security key tag with numbers that keep changing so you need that and the password to sign in.”The prosecutor said Mr Wright and Mr Bagg asked for the security key fob and copies of the audited financial statements, to no avail, for months.By the time they got the key fob in January 2009, there was virtually no money left in the ECI account.According to Ms Mulligan, when the theft came to light, Mr Bolden tried to arrange a promissory note to make up for the shortfall “but all the options failed and the Canadian investors were left with no option but to report it to the police.”Detective Constable Paul Fenwick, the first witness for the Crown, described seizing documents including bank statements, invoices and e-mails from the Boldens' home and office during the investigation.Mrs Bolden spent three days in police custody after being arrested at her home early on the morning of July 1 2009.According to Det Con Fenwick: “Mrs Bolden answered ‘no comment' to all lines of inquiry.”He faced allegations from defence lawyer Saul Froomkin QC that he failed to interview figures including lawyers Kevin Bean and Angela Berry who represented ECI plus Donte Hunt, its vice-president of business development.Det Con Fenwick confirmed he did not ask them for interviews, but said he did not see “any lines of inquiry” to make that necessary.Mr Froomkin also suggested the bookkeeping for ECI was done “for the most part” by a company in Mauritius called Intercontinental Trust.Det Con Fenwick said he believed Mrs Bolden did the accounting and “did not see the need to pursue” documents from Mauritius seized during the investigation. The case continues.