Evergreen is out of business. The fraud scheme is the largest in Florida history, court documents show.
Zylka will be sentenced July 16 in Manhattan's New York State Supreme Court. He faces prison time of six years to 18 years. Lawyers following the two-year-old case tell GlobeSt.com on condition of anonymity they are betting Zylka will get 10 years with probation.
The conviction allows Bill Cuthill Jr., the U.S. Bankruptcy Court-appointed trustee in Orlando to go after an estimated $8 million worth of Zylka's family stock assets in a startup Canadian mining company, court records show.
Cuthill is confident he can recover 25% or about $53.5 million of the $214 million in funds missing from Evergreen's bank account. The bulk of the missing money remains hidden in offshore banks such as the Surety Bank & Trust Co. of Nassau, operated periodically by other Evergreen principals, court records show.
Zylka's guilty plea covers at least $27.7 million the entrepreneur has admitted taking from Evergreen as personal loans that were not repaid.
An undetermined number of creditors are not expected to ask for some of their money back because they were initially hiding the funds from the Internal Revenue Service and state tax agencies, according to previous testimony in the case.
The scam was operated for 10 years without detection from plainly furnished leased offices on Pine Street in Downtown Orlando.
Orlando lawyers Martin W. Boelens Jr. and Robert W. Boyd, part of the Evergreen team, have each been charged with securities, mail and wire fraud. They have agreed to plead guilty in exchange for prison terms of less than 10 years, according to the U.S. Attorney's office in Manhattan.
This is the second set of charges facing Boelens, who has admitted acting as manager of the Evergreen operation. Boelens was convicted in January when he pleaded guilty in New York to charges of conspiralcy and grand larceny of $29.5 million of Evergreen's assets.
Former Evergreen securities salesmen Thomas S. Spencer of Orlando and Anthony V. Micciche of Tampa, FL have also been charged with securities, mail and wire fraud. Micciche faces an addition charge of selling unregistered securities.
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