John Rizzo

Trial Transcript in USA v. Jonathan Curshen and Nathan Montgomery at the U. S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.

Two husband-and-wife teams who specialized in selling sham offshore tax evasion vehicles to U. S. taxpayers via the Global Prosperity Group were dealt with by the criminal courts in December.

A fugitive international fraudster now living in Panama tried to impress potential victims by carrying around a "brown bag of cash" to buy a yacht and other expensive items, according to a court judgment. David Struckman, co-founder of the now-defunct Global Prosperity Group, obtained the money by emptying multiple ATMs of all their cash, it was claimed. Details of Struckman's purported spending habits were disclosed during proceedings at the U. S. District Court for the District of Oklahoma. Struckman was held in default for failing to comply with court rules and, on November 10, 2004, the court issued a judgment for $4.65 million against him and two of his firms, Pinnacle Quest International Inc., of Panama, and Synergy Productions International Inc., of Missouri, which he formed after abandoning GPG.

The U. S. Government is seeking to seize the alleged proceeds of narcotics trafficking that are held in accounts at Barclays Bank, in London, England in the name of British Virgin Islands-registered Auxerre Corporation; St. Kitts and Nevis-based Crowne Gold Inc., which is secretly controlled by offshore provider Terry Neal, has been slammed by an Ontario, Canada-based client for allegedly not assisting in the recovery of nearly US$6,000 that the client claims was defrauded from his account by a third-party; U. S.-based Spherion Corporation, which specializes in staffing, recruiting and workforce management, filed a civil complaint against the Cayman Islands Department of Tourism at federal court in the USA on January 29, 2004. Three former insiders of a now-defunct, Grenada-licensed offshore bank have each received non-custodial sentences for their participation in an investment fraud; Meanwhile, two other former insiders with another Grenada-licensed offshore bank, Robert John Skirving and Paul James Peiffer, both of Oregon, have suffered setbacks in their attempts to have their debts wiped out via bankruptcy; Investors who lost millions of dollars in the failed Bahamas-registered Oracle Fund have reached a settlement with the Fund's administrator, reported the Bahama Journal on January 23, 2004; The number of foreign-owned legal entities registered in Bermuda fell by 2.5 per cent from 13,870 to 13,528 during 2003, according to figures recently released by the Registrar of Companies; For a company that claims to manage so much money - more than $2.5 billion - Bermuda-based Orbis Investment Management Ltd. has surprisingly little transparency; A company in which St. Vincent and the Grenadines-licensed offshore bank Omnicorp Bank invested was named as a defendant in a civil lawsuit filed by the SEC at the U. S. District Court for the District of Utah on February 23, 2004; and A participant in an offshore-oriented scam perpetrated by an organization doing business as the Global Prosperity Group or the Institute of Global Prosperity has pleaded guilty to tax evasion in the United States.

Yet another person associated with the Global Prosperity Group, which promotes tax and investment fraud at offshore conferences, has been criminally indicted in the United States on tax-related charges.John J. Rizzo, who owns a home in the Bahamas, hid his income from the sale of a tax evasion product known as the Millennium 2000 Reliance Defense Program, accroding to the indictment.Rizzo, 51, a.k.a. John Rizzo-Nix; his wife, Carol Ann Rizzo, 57, a.k.a. Carol Rizzo-Nix; and Cheryl A. Cully were indicted on April 4, 2003 at the U. S. District Court for the District of Arizona.

Letter to the Editor of OffshoreAlert from J. David Hughes, an attorney representing John Rizzo.