Polk sued the insurance on the grounds that he was the victim of a robbery at the offices of a diamond company he owned in Hong Kong, where he had come to make a large diamond sale transaction. He claimed that two African representatives, allegedly the representatives of the buyer in the transaction, handcuffed him by hand and legs and beat him during the robbery, and with threats and violence demanded that he disable the alarm and the security cameras in the office and open the safe, from which they robbed diamonds and cash worth about 10 million dollars.
The court accepted the claim of the insurance companies that many of the diamonds that were reported as stolen remained with Polk’s company, rejected his version and stated that he tried to fraudulently obtain rewards from the insurance for diamonds that were only “apparently robbed”.
In 2017, the district court only raised doubts about the story of the robbery, and rejected Pollak’s claim, but the Supreme Court went a step further and stated in the appeal that “no robbery occurred”, pointing to suspicious actions by Pollak before the incident, such as extending the policy or choosing an unsecured location .
In 2017, the affair received media coverage, and Hap, who at the time tried to promote its IPO on the stock exchange, disowned Polk and announced that he “asked to leave his position since the company has enshrined the issue of reliability and transparency as top values.” In practice Polk continues to work for the company to this day.
On this, Amzel says: “As part of our move then, in preparation for the IPO, we removed him from the company, but after the move did not materialize, he remained in our private company in New York. He does not touch investors’ money, and it is only for the sake of visibility so that people will not be under unnecessary stress.”