A federal grand jury named the president of an Omaha investment company and the owner of an Omaha construction company in separate indictments, U.S. Attorney Deborah Gilg said Friday.
Ryan M. Jindra, 34, president and CEO of Envision Financial Group Inc. of Omaha, is charged with four counts of defrauding investors between July 2008 and July 2009.
The indictment alleges that he made false representations to clients to solicit money from them and transferred money from their accounts to the company and to his personal accounts. The indictment also alleges he wired $50,000 in October 2008 for a fraudulent scheme in Dallas and committed mail fraud in October 2008 and April 2009.
Possible penalties are up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine on each count.
Attorney David Domina, who represents Jindra, said Envision is closed. At one time the firm had investment advisers in about 20 states plus contracts with others for investment accounts, according to the Nebraska Department of Banking and Finance.
“A lot of businesses like his grew too fast and found things to be too easy,” Domina said. “All Americans know that now, and the aftermath is painful on a lot of levels.”
The core issue, he said, is whether there was intent to defraud clients. He said he couldn’t comment in detail because he hadn’t seen the indictments.
Domina said Jindra is cooperating with federal securities authorities in a separate lawsuit. In that case, the government alleges that Jindra defrauded investors of $773,000.
In July 2009 the State Department of Banking and Finance ordered Jindra and Envision to stop “dishonest and unethical business practices” and to show why he should not be fined and barred from the financial industry in Nebraska.
The department said it fined Jindra and Envision $5,000 in June 2008 and ordered an audit and other controls, but the company later filed “false and misleading documents” with the department, charged excessive management fees, made unauthorized withdrawals from client accounts and failed to pay employees and others.
In a separate indictment, the grand jury charged Linda Swain-Armstrong, 60, owner of Swain Construction Inc. of Omaha, with six counts of tax fraud. The indictment said she filed false corporate and individual tax returns for the years between 2002 and 2005 that understated the firm’s revenue and her personal income by a total of about $678,000.
She faces up to three years in prison and a $250,000 fine on each count.
Her attorney, James Martin Davis, said she denies that the tax returns were false, but there may be math errors or disagreements with the Internal Revenue Service over the formulas that accountants used to prepare the returns. The differences in dispute are the same percentage, 2.7 percent, for each year, he said.
“She certainly didn’t file those corporate returns with intent to defraud the IRS,” Davis said. “I doubt if anybody is going to skim off 2.7 percent of their income every year.”
On the individual returns, he said, the IRS may disagree with the way they reported different categories of income. He said the IRS could claim, at most, a total of about $150,000 in tax owed, but he believes the tax amount at issue is about $50,000.
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