The former president of E.S. Bankest, a south Florida factoring company, received a twenty-year term of imprisonment for convictions for a decade-long bank fraud and money laundering scheme that resulted in over $164 million in losses to the Espirito Santo Bank, a Portuguese bank. According to a press release (here) issued by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida:
[The defendant] was convicted of 39 felony counts, including bank fraud, wire fraud, money-laundering, conspiracy and submitting false statements to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Evidence at trial showed that E.S. Bankest, a factoring company in the business of funding clients secured by clients’ accounts receivable, borrowed multi-millions of dollars of money from Espirito Santo Bank clients based on fraud, including fabricated accounts receivable; Espirito Santo Group eventually took the debt positions of the clients, and absorbed the loss. The indictment charged a conspiracy from approximately June, 1994, until August, 2003, when an examiner was appointed by the federal court to look into the affairs of the company, which collapsed.
According to a Miami Herald article (here) on the sentencing, "[T]he judge said he based the sentence on the severity of the crime and a wish to have it serve as a deterrent to other white-collar crime." The defendant is 62, so this is virtually a life sentence. (ph)
One response to “Twenty-Year Sentence for Bank Fraud”
20 years for fraud and its below guideline?!?! When your daughter is walking the streets alone at night, who are you afraid she will run into; a low level violent offender or the white collar guy? We have gone too far
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