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The Bruce Matson-LandAmerica saga appears to be coming to an end. The imprisoned former Richmond attorney reached a settlement this week with the trustee overseeing the bankruptcy estate of the long-defunct Henrico-based title insurance company, RichmondBizSense.com reported. Matson, who was LandAmerica’s original bankruptcy trustee, is now serving a four-year federal prison sentence for stealing millions of dollars from the company’s bankruptcy wind-down fund. That crime forced him to relinquish his role as trustee, as the court handed the title over to longtime Richmond attorney Ben Ackerly. In January, as Matson sat in prison, Ackerly filed a lawsuit claiming Matson breached his fiduciary duty to the estate as a result of his crimes and sought a judgment forcing Matson to pay back at least $480,000. That would have been in addition to more than $4 million Matson has already paid back into the LandAmerica trust after his theft was discovered. But this week’s settlement, which awaits the court’s approval, will not result in any additional funds from Matson. Instead, it calls for an end to the suit, for both sides to release any claims against one another and to bar both sides from making any additional related claims against the other in the future — all without Matson paying any more into the LandAmerica trust.

A federal grand jury in Newark, N.J., yesterday unsealed an indictment charging the operator of a New Jersey construction business with tax evasion, employment tax crimes, aiding the filing of false tax returns, and making false statements in bankruptcy, according to a DOJ press release. According to the indictment, Zeki Donuk, of Landing, operated a construction business first under the name Titan Builders LLC and later as Titan Steel Construction LLC (collectively, “Titan”). From at least 2016 through 2019, Donuk allegedly cashed checks payable to Titan instead of depositing them into business bank accounts. Donuk allegedly concealed the cashed checks and did not report them either as gross receipts on Titan’s corporate tax returns, or as income on his or his wife’s personal returns. According to the indictment, from the third quarter of 2016 through the third quarter of 2017 Donuk also did not collect, account for, or pay over to the IRS employment taxes on behalf of Titan’s employees, despite a legal obligation to do so. For those quarters, Donuk allegedly did not file quarterly employment tax returns on behalf of the businesses. The indictment charged that in 2019, Donuk allegedly made false statements on documents he filed in a personal bankruptcy case. Specifically, Donuk allegedly concealed from the bankruptcy court that he owned a vacation property in Pennsylvania, had signatory authority over certain bank accounts, owed tax debts to the IRS, and operated his construction business as Titan Builders and Titan Steel. If convicted, Donuk faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison on each count of tax evasion, employment tax violations and bankruptcy fraud charges, and a maximum penalty of three years in prison on each of the counts of aiding or assisting the filing of false tax returns. He also faces a period of supervised release, restitution and monetary penalties.

The jurors in Nikola Corp. founder Trevor Milton’s criminal fraud trial have reached a verdict, Bloomberg News reported. The judge had instructed them on the law and dispatched them to their deliberations at around 10:30 a.m. Friday, after a monthlong trial. Milton, 40, is charged with two counts of securities fraud and two counts of wire fraud for misleading investors about the electric truck company’s prospects. During the trial, prosecutors showed the jury an infamous viral video that appeared to show a Nikola semi prototype traveling under its own power, when in fact it was rolling downhill thanks to gravity. Milton faces the possibility of years in prison if convicted.

Victims of Bernard Madoff’s massive Ponzi scheme will soon get another $372 million in payouts, bringing the total amount distributed from a government fund to more than $4 billion since the collapse of the fraudster’s company in 2008, Bloomberg News reported. The eighth payment so far from the U.S. Justice Department’s Madoff Victim Fund will go out to about 40,000 victims worldwide, and will increase the total recovery from all sources of compensation to 88% of losses, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan said Wednesday in a statement. The money was raised through government settlements with Madoff’s bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co., as well as some of his oldest customers, such as investor Jeffry Picower, who died in 2009, according to the statement. Madoff died last year in prison, where he was serving a 150-year prison term. “This office continues its historic work seeking justice for the victims of Madoff’s heinous crimes,” U.S. Attorney for Manhattan Damian Williams said in the statement. “But our work is not fully complete, and this Office’s tireless commitment to compensating the victims who suffered as a result of Madoff’s crimes continues.” The U.S. fund is separate from the repayment process being overseen by a trustee, Irving Picard, in federal bankruptcy court in Manhattan. His litigation against customers who profited from the scam has so far recovered more than $14.5 billion, most of which has already been returned to victims.

Criminals potentially stole an estimated $45.6 billion by making fraudulent unemployment insurance claims meant for people laid off during the COVID-19 pandemic, a government watchdog said, the Wall Street Journal reported. The new tally is nearly three times last summer’s estimate of over $16 billion in fraudulent payments. More than half of the potential fraud identified between March 2020 and April 2022 stemmed from individuals filing for benefits in multiple states. Fraudsters also used the Social Security numbers of people who were dead or in prison, as well as suspicious email addresses, the Labor Department’s inspector general’s office said in a report released Thursday. More than 1,000 people have been charged with crimes involving unemployment insurance fraud since March 2020, the report said. The inspector general’s office said it didn’t have access to the most current federal prisoner data for its report and focused on other high-risk areas of fraud. The pandemic unemployment insurance program, started in March 2020, gave those who lost their jobs an extra $600 a week in federal aid at first, which was later reduced to $300 a week. The supplemental benefit expired last year. More than $872 billion in pandemic aid has been paid out since March 2020, according to the inspector general’s office.

The Justice Department said on Tuesday that it had charged 47 people with running a brazen fraud against anti-hunger programs during the coronavirus pandemic, stealing $240 million by billing the government for meals they did not serve to children who did not exist, the New York Times reported. The case, in Minnesota, is the largest fraud uncovered in any pandemic-relief program, prosecutors said, standing out even in a period when heavy federal spending and lax oversight allowed a spree of scams with few recent parallels. The Minnesota operation, prosecutors said, involved faked receipts for 125 million meals. At times, it was especially bold: One accused conspirator told the government he had fed 5,000 children a day in a second-story apartment. Other defendants in the case seemed to put minimal effort into disguising what they were doing, using the website listofrandomnames.com to create a fake list of children they could charge for feeding. Others used a number-generating program to produce ages for the children they were supposedly feeding, which led the ages to fluctuate wildly each time the group updated its list of those nonexistent children, court papers said. But their scheme still pulled in millions of dollars per week, prosecutors said in court papers, because government officials had relaxed oversight of the feeding program during the pandemic and because the other defendants had help from a trusted insider.

The cryptocurrency industry, rather than democratizing financial services as its promoters have promised, so far has produced a minefield of frauds and thefts that federal regulators should redouble their efforts to police, the Treasury Department said in a new report, the Washington Post reproted. The department is urging financial watchdogs to make use of the authorities they already have, instead of waiting for Congress to clarify which agency will take the lead in developing rules for the sector. And it is pushing regulators and law enforcement officials to team up on tougher investigations into potential illegal activity in crypto markets. The report — focused on crypto’s impact on consumers, investors and businesses — is one of a series of studies Treasury and other agencies released Friday in response to a sweeping review of the federal government’s approach to digital assets that President Biden ordered in March. The others focus on the threats crypto poses to combating illicit finance and what the technology could mean for streamlining payment systems, including through the launch of a U.S. digital dollar.