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LAS VEGAS – Two former Japanese investment industry leaders pleaded not guilty in Las Vegas on Thursday for criminal fraud charges in what prosecutors have called an international ponzi scheme of $ 1.5 billion.
Junzo Suzuki, 70, and his 40 – year – old son, Paul Suzuki, arrived in custody in the United States on Wednesday and appeared before a federal magistrate who scheduled Wednesday a hearing to decide whether to arrest him. they will be released from prison pending trial.
Their lawyers, Richard Wright and Junji Suzuki, declined to comment outside the court. Junji Suzuki said that he was not related to the defendants.
Junzo and Paul Suzuki were arrested in Japan in January, two months after a federal jury in Las Vegas declared their co-defendant, Edwin Fujinaga, 72, guilty of 20 counts of mail fraud, wire electronic and money laundering.
Fujinaga once ran a Las Vegas-based company, MRI International Inc., bringing together thousands of Japanese investors who became victims.
He should face what would be equivalent to the rest of his life in a federal prison sentence, which was postponed last week to 23 May. Prosecutors ask a judge to sentence him to 50 years in prison.
In court documents, US attorneys have compared the Las Vegas case to the biggest lawsuits ever filed under the US Ponzi scheme: Bernard Madoff's guilty plea in New York in 2009, convicted of the death penalty. Allen Stanford in Houston in 2012 and guilty plea of Scott Rothstein in 2010 in Miami.
Madoff, now 80, was sentenced to 150 years in jail for stealing at least $ 20 billion from investors in the thousands. Stanford, 69, is serving a 110-year sentence in a program of more than $ 7 billion. Rothstein, 56, has been serving a $ 1.2 billion sentence for 50 years.
Court documents indicate that Junzo Suzuki was executive vice president of MRI International and that Paul Suzuki was head of operations in Tokyo.
From 2009 to early 2013, prosecutors announced that more than 10,000 Japanese investors had invested more than $ 1 billion in bank accounts in Las Vegas, under the control of Fujinaga. According to the indictment, investors had learned that they were buying debts from a drug collection company.
Instead, Fujinaga was found guilty of using the new investors' money to repay previous investors and spent the rest for himself, including a golf mansion in Las Vegas, a private jet. , luxury cars and real estate in the wine regions of California, Beverly Hills and Hawaii. .
Prosecutors say that when the Japanese government revoked the MRI license in April 2013, the company owed investors more than $ 1.5 billion.
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