Santos saga continues: financial crime?

A month after the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit in 2021 accusing a Florida-based company of operating a Ponzi scheme, one of the firm’s account managers assured an anxious client that his money was safe.

The client, a wealthy investor named Andrew Intrater, had been lured by annual returns of 16 percent and had invested $625,000 in a fund offered by the company, Harbor City Capital — in part because he trusted and admired the account manager, an aspiring politician named George Santos.

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The letter of credit did not exist, the S.E.C. would later tell a court. The $100 million that Mr. Santos told Mr. Intrater that he had personally raised for Harbor City did not exist either, the commission said. Nor, seemingly, did the close to $4 million that Mr. Santos claimed he and his family had invested in Harbor City.

Mr. Santos’s representations form the basis of a sworn declaration that Mr. Intrater gave the S.E.C. in May 2022, as part of its Harbor City investigation.

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Mr. Intrater told the S.E.C. that the representations influenced his decision to invest in Mr. Santos’s business and political endeavors — an allegation that could leave Mr. Santos vulnerable to criminal charges.

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He shared with The New York Times text messages that he exchanged with Mr. Santos, as well as documents and the declaration that he had given to the S.E.C. — all outlining the ways in which he said Mr. Santos had misled him.

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Although Mr. Santos claimed to have raised $100 million for Harbor City, S.E.C. documents say the firm had only raised a total of $17 million. And while Mr. Santos said that he and his family had invested millions of dollars because of Harbor City, financial disclosures filed during his 2020 run for Congress show that he earned just $55,000 that year, and had no assets.

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According to court documents filed by the S.E.C., Harbor City told investors that it had discovered a way to make guaranteed money by investing in digital marketing and advertising.

But Harbor City was not doing any such investing, and only a small part of the $17 million it raised was used for legitimate business expenses, the government claims. The company, according to civil charges filed by the S.E.C., was instead engaged in a Ponzi scheme, using investments from new clients to make payments to older investors.

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Mr. Intrater became one of Mr. Santos’s more generous patrons. In addition to his investments in Harbor City funds, first reported by The Washington Post, he donated more than $200,000 to Mr. Santos’s election campaign, associated political committees and a New York PAC that he would later learn was controlled by Mr. Santos’s sister.

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Mr. Santos, who was not named in the S.E.C. suit, has publicly said he had no knowledge of wrongdoing at Harbor City.

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Mr. Intrater is a private equity investor perhaps best known for his financial ties to Viktor Vekselberg, his cousin. Mr. Vekselberg is a Russian oligarch whose U.S. assets were frozen in 2018 by the Treasury Department because of his ties to the Kremlin.

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Mr. Intrater is also known for his relationship with Michael D. Cohen, Donald J. Trump’s onetime personal lawyer; Mr. Intrater’s firm, Columbus Nova, signed Mr. Cohen to a $1 million consulting contract when the businessman was looking for new investment opportunities in 2018.

  NYT

I think you can judge the legitimacy of Mr. Intrater's activities themeselves by the connections he has to well-known shady characters.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.