Sep 28 2021, 12:39 AM By Alan J. Keays and Anne Galloway
‘Aided and abetted’: Newly unsealed records show state feared its own culpability in EB-5 fraud SNIPPET:
The newly unsealed documents shed new light on the state’s role in regulating — or failing to regulate — development projects financed through the federal EB-5 investor visa program, which confers permanent residency on noncitizens who invest at least $500,000 in certain job-creating ventures.
The documents show that the
Shumlin administration was aware in the spring of 2015 that the
😈
Northeast Kingdom developers were engaging in
fraud — a full year before state and federal officials pulled the plug on the projects — imperiling the immigration status of those who invested in the developments.
The records also outline the lengths to which state officials went in concealing the fraud from the public and the press.One of the newly unsealed documents, published April 13, 2015, describes in explicit detail how state regulators viewed the Northeast Kingdom developments at the time. The internal and confidential document, penned by an unnamed employee of the state Department of Financial Regulation, reads, “Every project appears to be involved in an array of deceptive practices. Every single additional penny of investor money that moves through the projects will be lost for good. New investors most certainly will not be issued visas as the SEC will act long before the two year job creation period ends.”
Four months later, according to one newly released document, a top Department of Financial Regulation official briefed Shumlin, then-Attorney General Bill Sorrell and others on the evidence the department had collected implicating the developers. The official, then-Deputy Financial Regulation Commissioner Mike Pieciak, included in his August 14, 2015, slide presentation a spaghetti map of bank transactions the developers used to perpetuate the fraud.
The final slide, a spreadsheet titled “Immigration Impact to Investors,” listed a series of projects for which “Immigration Status was Likely to be Negated.” In all, the immigration status of 364 investors, or 42% of the total, were in jeopardy. State regulators made clear that 83 investors in a Burke Mountain Resort hotel, 134 in the Stateside condos at Jay Peak and 147 at a biotech venture in Newport would not be eligible for visas because of the fraud.
Read more:
https://vtdigger.org/2021/09/28/aided-and-abetted-newly-unsealed-records-show-state-feared-its-own-culpability-in-eb-5-fraud/