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The Samana Landbank Trust is the most professional-looking product Marek Zmyslowski has ever launched. It comes with a Swiss ISIN, a fiduciary trust wrapper, “185% asset coverage” and a 12% annual yield. After the wave of complaints around Samana Group crowdlending and the Hacienda Cocuyo fundraising, that polish is by design. This page strips the wrapper and looks at what the structure actually protects — and what it does not.

What the Samana Landbank Trust actually is

Marketing presents the Trust as an institutional-grade, real-estate-backed instrument. The headline pitch is simple:

• 12% annual return,
• a Swiss ISIN identifier,
• a “collateralized loan” structure,
• 185% asset coverage on paper,
• option to convert into Dominican real estate.

Underneath the wrapper, the mechanics are not new. The Trust acquires plots of land cheaply via a “Landbank” entity, then sells them at a higher internal valuation to the “Development Trust”. The margin between those two prices is the source of the promised yield. As long as new investor capital keeps flowing in, the model works on paper. The moment that flow slows, the same dynamic that hit Zmyslowski’s previous Polish crowdlending hits this Trust too.

The numbers under the hood

According to materials produced by Samana itself:

• land was acquired at approximately USD 5 per square meter,
• the same land was then presented to investors at several times that valuation,
• Phase 1 looked profitable on slides only because it covered a minimal scope of work, far smaller than the headline plan of roughly 1,000 units.

If you re-run the model at the full scale that is being sold — the 1,000-unit project — the math stops working even under generous sales assumptions. The headline 12% yield depends on:

1. a continuous, large inflow of new investors,
2. land valuations that the local Dominican market does not actually support, and
3. construction execution by a team with no prior development track record (see Nomad City warning).

The “Worst Case Scenario” in plain English

The Trust’s own “Worst Case Scenario” documentation describes a cascade. Translated out of marketing language, it reads like this:

1. Escrow reserves are depleted — the cash buffer goes first.
2. The land is put up for sale on the Dominican market.
3. If the land does not sell at the valuation Samana put on it, liability shifts to Samana Group itself.
4. If Samana Group has no money — and the company has repeatedly described itself as cash-constrained — the land is taken over by Estating.

The crucial sentence is what does not happen in any of those steps: investors do not get their cash back. The best realistic outcome is that the investor ends up holding a piece of Dominican land at a market price that may be a fraction of the value they were sold on.

What a Swiss ISIN is — and what it is not

An ISIN (International Securities Identification Number) is a 12-character code that identifies a security. It is an administrative identifier, not a guarantee of anything. In particular, a Swiss ISIN does not mean any of the following:

• It is not a bank guarantee.
• It is not a guarantee from the Swiss government.
• It does not mean a Swiss bank is a counterparty to your money.
• It does not trigger any reimbursement scheme if Samana Group fails to repay.

If, at the end of the line, Marek Zmyslowski simply tells investors there is no money — the same scenario already documented in the Facts vs. Lies section about the Szczecin apartment — the ISIN does not unlock a Swiss vault. It just identifies a security that did not pay.

Red flags any prospective investor should test

Before transferring any funds into the Samana Landbank Trust, run the following due-diligence checklist:

• Cash exit clause. Read your contract. Is there a date by which you can demand cash, not land? In current Trust documentation, early exit is effectively not available.
• Independent valuation. Ask for a recent appraisal of the underlying land, prepared by a Dominican appraiser unaffiliated with Samana.
• Use of proceeds. Confirm in writing that your money goes into Phase 1 construction, not into servicing older crowdlending or Hacienda Cocuyo obligations.
• Beneficial ownership. Identify which legal entity actually owns the land at the moment your money lands. The recent registration of the parallel GRUPO SAMANA REH SAS entity (tax number 133-45383-5) in the Dominican Republic is a structural detail worth asking about.
• Track record of guarantees. Check what happened to previous personal guarantees from Marek Zmyslowski — including the Szczecin apartment that was sold quietly, and the personal guarantees attached to crowdlending loans now in delay.

None of those checks are aggressive. They are the questions any institutional allocator would ask before committing capital. The fact that the answers are hard to obtain is itself the most informative part of the review.

Continue reading

• Marek Zmyslowski fraud history: Nigeria, Poland, Dominican Republic
• Nomad City Dominican Republic: investor warning on apartments and reservation fees
• Back to the full Samana Group investigation