US$20M fraud scheme…EZjet boss back in court tomorrow

Dec 16, 2012 News

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Founder of EZjet Air Services, Sonny Ramdeo, who was arrested last Tuesday in Brooklyn, New York, while on the run is set to attend court tomorrow for a bail hearing.
Ramdeo, facing fraud charges for allegedly stealing US$20M from a US hospital chain, remained in the custody of federal authorities after an initial court appearance Wednesday before Magistrate Judge Vera Scanlon, hours after his arrest by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

However, through his lawyer, Kannan Sundaram, he immediately moved for bail.
According to court documents filed, the 35-year-old executive waived his right to an identity hearing and preliminary examinations by the court. It would mean that the former Windsor Forest, West Coast Demerara resident, who was based in Florida, has signaled his intentions to fight the fraud charges in Florida courts.
The bail hearing is set for a Brooklyn, New York court tomorrow morning.
However, it seems unlikely that he will be allowed his pre-trial liberty as Assistant US Attorney, Catherine Mirabile, was already successful in securing a temporary detention order since Wednesday. With charges filed against Ramdeo since December 6, and the FBI reportedly looking for him since last month, the possibilities of bail being granted for the EZjet founder seem all the more remote.
Ramdeo, according to court documents, reportedly stole US$20M from a hospital chain over a seven-year period.
Some of the monies he is accused of stealing were said to be used to finance the operations of EZjet, a chartered airline that he started up last year December, according to prosecutors. Wifredo A. Ferrer, United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida; Michael B. Steinbach, Acting Special Agent in Charge, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI); Jose A. Gonzalez, Special Agent in Charge, Internal Revenue Service, Criminal Investigation Division (IRS-CID); and Christopher B. Dennis, Special Agent in Charge, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General (HHS-OIG), investigated the fraud and charged Ramdeo, 35, with wire fraud.
The Federal agents said that Ramdeo kept the money paid by Promise and Success Healthcare to his private company, PayServ, for his personal use.
Ramdeo is expected to be removed to the Southern District of Florida on these charges.
The federal agents had signaled their intention to arrest him in early November.

In hiding
He immediately went into hiding, but gave the impression through his local country manager, Rosalinda Rasul, that he was communicating with the Feds.
He even returned as Chief Executive Officer having resigned when the first accusation of theft surfaced through a writ filed by Promise Healthcare, accusing him of stealing US$5.4 million.
Ramdeo, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced late Wednesday, will soon be taken to Florida, another state in the US, to face trial for the charges which were instituted on December 6, all linked to Promise Healthcare.
A former resident of Windsor Forest, West Coast Demerara, the 35-year-old Ramdeo faces up to 60 years in jail on three counts of wire fraud (20 years on each of the three counts), with a mandatory fine of US$250,000.
He could also be fined twice the amount of money he stole or twice the sum his victim lost.
Rasul admitted Thursday that Ramdeo was on the run from the time the Feds declared an interest in him.
The details emerging now speak of a man who closely controlled the troubled low-cost carrier even while hiding from the FBI. He managed to fool staffers into believing that everything was alright. He would only answer e-mails. Nobody seemed to have known where he was.
Investigators cornered Ramdeo in Brooklyn, New York on Tuesday night.
He was immediately arrested and placed before Magistrate Judge Scanlon in a federal court in the Eastern District of New York.

Conspiracy
Court documents released by the Feds explained that Ramdeo was employed as the Director of Payroll of Promise Healthcare Inc. and Success Healthcare LLC, which in total, operated 17 hospitals across the US. He was responsible for the payments of bi-weekly wages and related payroll taxes for more than 3,500 employees of the companies.
According to the indictment, as early as September 3, 2010, and continuing through on or about October 12, 2012, at Boca Raton, Palm Beach County, in the Southern District of Florida, and elsewhere, Ramdeo devised a scheme to defraud the hospitals by stealing the payroll taxes.
He did this by establishing a company called Payserv Tax Inc. which he claimed, using false e-mails, was a subsidiary of Ceridian Corporation, a well known company that once did payroll services for the hospitals.
It was based on this claim that the hospitals trusted him and Payserv with millions of dollars.
Using this authority, he routinely transferred money from the hospitals to his Payserv accounts.
The indictment also said that Ramdeo, in November 2011, incorporated EZjet and later, without authorization, transferred the money from Payserv to the accounts of EZjet.
This was for expenses including airplane and crew rental, fuel, food, ground crew and air terminal costs.
The name EZjet and Sonny Ramdeo became well known in Guyana over the past year after the low-cost charter started flying the New York to Georgetown route in December last year.
Immediately, there were questions about the source of financing and his mysterious investors.
The Guyana Government said that EZjet and Ramdeo passed inspection and that the US and other territories had conducted similar due diligence.
Ramdeo flew to Guyana earlier this year with a management team and during a press conference, insisted that it was his own money, taken from savings, his pension and stock options and mortgage that funded the charter.
In early November, EZjet had its licence revoked by the US Department of Transportation after Swift Air, an Arizona-based aircraft company, complained that the low-cost charter owed them a significant sum of money. Guyana, Trinidad and Toronto, Canada followed suit.
Workers walked out of the New York office not long after, leaving passengers unsure how they would get back hundreds of thousands of US dollars.
Rasul said that stranded Guyanese passengers could be owed as much as $50M, with over 300 of them to be refunded.
The company’s Georgetown office had issued cheques to a number of stranded Guyanese passengers with a pay date of December 14.
She begged stranded passengers in Guyana not to take those cheques to the bank as there is no money in the EZjet accounts. She said that Government is now handling refunds. Government is holding US$200,000 ($40M) in a passengers’ security deposit for EZjet.
Rasul distanced herself from the Ramdeo arrest, making it clear that she was not aware of any suspicious monies in EZjet’s accounts in Guyana. She is unaware of the status of the bank accounts of EZjet in the US. Only Ramdeo knew about all of the company’s finances.
The official was unclear what would happen to the passengers in New York who were left stranded.

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