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The FBI seems to have launched an investigation right into a Bellevue-based actual property funding agency, the primary indication that the corporate’s former executives might face legal expenses linked to allegations they ran a Ponzi scheme.
For at the least the final decade, iCap raised cash from buyers in Washington state and elsewhere, promising to spend money on Seattle-area actual property tasks. However final spring, buyers grew involved as the corporate stopped making month-to-month curiosity funds. By the autumn, iCap filed for chapter and a third-party restructuring agency, Paladin, took over.
Paladin stated final month it believed iCap was a Ponzi scheme, utilizing investor funds to repay different buyers whereas doing little of the true property redevelopment it promised. In response to chapter filings, the corporate owes 1,800 buyers and different entities a complete of $250 million.
As a part of the chapter case, attorneys for former CEO Chris Christensen wrote in courtroom filings final week that the U.S. Securities and Alternate Fee and FBI “just lately opened a legal investigation into iCap.”
“It’s too quickly to know whether or not the investigation will result in any indictments or who the targets are,” Christensen’s attorneys wrote, urging the courtroom to carry off on figuring out whether or not the corporate was a Ponzi scheme “till the events have a clearer understanding of the legal investigation.”
Christensen has denied that the operation was a Ponzi scheme.
The restructuring firm final month urged a chapter choose to seek out that iCap operated a Ponzi scheme, alleging that the majority of iCap’s earnings got here from buyers, not from actual property tasks, and that iCap used most of its money to make funds to buyers, not for actual property tasks. A Ponzi discovering might permit the corporate to faucet into extra financing to fund the continued chapter, in response to courtroom filings.
The dispute seems to have attracted the eye of federal regulators in current months.
The SEC notified Christensen in February it was investigating iCap, and the “federal authorities confirmed its investigation of the identical” this month, Christensen’s attorneys wrote.
Each companies declined to remark. It’s unclear how the investigations are associated. The SEC doesn’t conduct legal investigations.
Whereas investigations are of their “nascent levels,” Christensen and others have obtained subpoenas from the SEC and the Washington State Division of Monetary Establishments, the attorneys wrote.
Christensen’s attorneys didn’t reply to a request for remark Monday, however have denied in courtroom filings that he operated a Ponzi scheme.
Attorneys representing iCap buyers, who’re nonetheless ready to seek out out if they’ll ever recoup their investments, welcomed a federal probe. Traders “ought to really feel inspired realizing that federal investigations are underway,” John Bender, an legal professional representing the committee of buyers within the chapter proceedings, stated in a press release. “We are going to assist federal investigators nevertheless we will.”
Christensen, the previous CEO, “vehemently disputes” the Ponzi scheme allegations, his attorneys wrote.
ICap “purchased, developed and bought or in any other case exited out of roughly 60-70 actual property tasks in Vancouver, Seattle, Tacoma, Bellevue and Renton, producing a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in proceeds,” they wrote this month. That work included securing permits and paying for development work, “a big enterprise operation that accomplished a lot of sophisticated actual property tasks.”
That exercise “stands in stark distinction to the everyday Ponzi scheme,” they argued, including later, “Even an unprofitable enterprise isn’t synonymous with a Ponzi scheme.”
Christensen additionally disputed the conclusion from a guide Paladin employed that iCap was a Ponzi scheme, claiming the guide lacked experience in actual property and primarily based his findings on incomplete data.
Christensen, the restructuring firm and different events within the chapter proceed to argue about whether or not iCap operated a Ponzi scheme and whether or not a chapter choose ought to determine on that query any time quickly.
Christensen’s attorneys contend the legal investigation might intrude with Christensen’s Fifth Modification proper towards self-incrimination and that the federal government might use the chapter course of to get “untimely entry” to proof related to the legal case.
Chapter Decide Whitman Holt appeared sympathetic to that argument throughout a current listening to, saying he discovered “this dynamic very troubling” and was “involved about speeding ahead in a method that steps on different folks’s toes or creates issues.”
Investor legal professional Jay Kornfeld famous {that a} yr has handed since iCap stopped making curiosity funds to buyers. “For buyers and people [who] have misplaced in lots of instances their life financial savings, that’s a very long time, and we’d urge the courtroom to maintain this course of going,” he stated.
The following listening to within the case is about for Wednesday.
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