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A Scottsdale attorney has been sentenced to 18 months in prison and ordered to pay nearly $1.4 million in restitution in a bankruptcy fraud case, the Associated Press reported. Prosecutors say that Scott Allan Maasen previously pleaded guilty to one count of concealment of assets in bankruptcy. He must pay restitution to the U.S. Small Business Administration. Maasen filed for bankruptcy in 2009 after he stopped making payments on a $1.5 million loan. As part of his plea, Maasen admitted he purchased a $90,000 engagement ring for his fiance while his bankruptcy proceedings were pending. Prosecutors say Maasen used a credit card and bank accounts in his father’s name to make the payments to give the false appearance that Maasen’s dad had bought the ring.

A former Justice Department employee pleaded guilty on Friday to helping funnel tens of millions of dollars into the U.S. for the alleged mastermind of the multibillion-dollar fraud involving Malaysia’s sovereign-wealth fund, the Wall Street Journal reported. Some of the $74 million allegedly brought into the U.S. on behalf of Jho Low, a Malaysian businessman, was used to pay a prominent Republican fundraiser, court documents show. Low sought to use the funds to influence the Justice Department investigation into the fund, 1Malaysia Development Bhd, and other foreign lobbying activities, the documents said. George Higginbotham, who worked at the Justice Department as a senior congressional affairs specialist until August, pleaded guilty Friday to conspiring to make false statements to banks about the source and purpose of the funds to move them into the U.S. The Justice Department said Higginbotham played no role in the U.S. investigation, which led earlier this month to charges against two senior Goldman Sachs Group Inc. bankers along with Mr. Low. In addition, the Justice Department has filed civil-forfeiture lawsuits seeking to recover more than $1.5 billion in illicit assets accused of being tied to the alleged fraud. Higginbotham “failed to influence any aspect of the Department’s investigation of 1MDB,” the agency said.

Thousands of victims of Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme are due to get checks totaling $695 million from a U.S. Justice Department fund created through settlements with some of the con man’s oldest customers and his bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bloomberg News reported. The payout, to 27,000 victims worldwide, is the third distribution from the $4 billion fund, the department said Thursday in a statement. The government-led recovery is separate from a $13.3 billion fund overseen by a trustee who’s been liquidating Madoff’s firm in court for the past 10 years to compensate people he duped. Madoff’s investors lost a total of $19 billion in principal and more than $40 billion in fake profit when his securities firm collapsed in December 2008. Federal prosecutors called it the biggest Ponzi scheme in history. Madoff, 80, was sentenced to 150 years behind bars after pleading guilty in 2009.

The former president of a Kerrville, Texas, consulting company is facing a criminal charge in connection with an alleged scheme that’s blamed for leading the firm into bankruptcy, the San Antonio Express-News reported. A San Antonio federal grand jury yesterday indicted Stephen Canty on the charge of making false statements on a credit or loan application, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Bud Paulissen. Canty faces up to 30 years in prison if convicted. The HJH Consulting Group Inc., which does business as the Salt Group, and two related firms, US Tax Recovery Partners and B2B Prospecting, filed for Chapter 11 reorganization April 2. During an April creditors meeting, HJH bankruptcy lawyer James Wilkins accused Canty of overstating the amount of money clients owed the company by $25 million. Canty was able to tap more of the company’s $27 million line of credit with Texas Capital Bank by manipulating the books, Wilkins added.

A government program meant to forgive the federal loans of cheated students has all but stopped functioning, the New York Times reported. No Education Department employees are devoted full time to investigating borrowers’ complaints. Instead, the agency’s staff has fought in court to reduce the amount of relief granted to some students and to halt a rule change intended to speed other claims along. That has left more than 100,000 claims for relief in limbo, according to the Education Department’s most recent data. The relief program, called borrower defense, became a popular way for students to seek debt forgiveness after several major for-profit schools went bust in recent years. During the Obama administration, the Education Department approved about 30,000 claims, more than half of them in the final two weeks before the new administration took over. All of those borrowers had their loans fully forgiven. But President Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, who before taking office invested in companies with ties to for-profit colleges and student-loan debt collectors, has derided the program as a “free money” giveaway and vowed to make changes. She has also appointed a former dean of DeVry University — a for-profit school that is the subject of some 10,000 fraud claims by former students — to oversee the unit that runs the program. As of mid-2018, her department had approved only 16,000 claims, and Education Department officials confirmed that about 15,000 of those were granted partial forgiveness. Tens of thousands more still await a decision.

Years before Goldman Sachs Group Inc. arranged bond deals now at the heart of globe-spanning corruption probes, the firm’s then-CEO Lloyd Blankfein personally helped forge ties with Malaysia and its new sovereign wealth fund, Bloomberg reported. Blankfein was the unidentified high-ranking Goldman Sachs executive referenced in U.S. court documents who attended a 2009 meeting with the former Malaysian prime minister, the people said. The meeting was arranged with the help of men who are now tied to the subsequent plundering of the 1MDB fund, according to U.S. court documents unsealed last week. The high-level gathering laid the groundwork for a relationship that would prove profitable for the investment bank. Since then, the use of $6.5 billion that Goldman raised for 1MDB has sparked investigations across several nations, and entangled the U.S. bank in a high-profile corruption probe.