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Del Kimball, a prominent figure in Kansas City’s payday lending scene, waived a federal indictment on Tuesday afternoon and pleaded guilty to a bankruptcy fraud charge, the Kansas City Star reported. Kimball, 53, appeared before U.S. District Court Judge Beth Phillips, who accepted Kimball’s guilty plea. He’s set for sentencing on June 2; he will remain out on personal recognizance bond until then, so long as he does not travel outside of the Kansas City area and surrenders his passport. He faces no more than five years in prison and up to a $250,000 fine. The charges against Kimball stem from his personal bankruptcy case from 2015. Kimball, as well as a downtown Kansas City payday loan company he co-owned called LTS Management, were forced into involuntary bankruptcy by creditors claiming to be owed millions of dollars from investments into payday lending. In 2017, a bankruptcy trustee accused Kimball of concealing assets, bank accounts and income from his bankruptcy disclosures. Debtors in bankruptcy are supposed to reveal all aspects of their financial condition. Those omissions, according to the trustee, included his sale of a warehouse for nearly $1 million, the sale of three cars for more than $120,000, eight wristwatches worth more than $29,000 and a painting by Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood.

Toronto-Dominion Bank will defend itself in a trial starting in a Canadian court on Monday in which liquidators of the collapsed Antigua bank of former Texas financier Robert Allen Stanford are seeking $5.5 billion in damages, Reuters reported. The joint liquidators of Stanford International Bank (SIB) allege “negligence and knowing assistance” by TD, Canada’s second-biggest lender, in allowing SIB to maintain correspondent accounts, according to a statement filed with the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in 2019. Correspondent banking is the business of providing services to offshore financial institutions. The joint liquidators are Grant Thornton in the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands. The trial is scheduled to last three months, a spokesman for one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers said. Stanford is serving a 110-year prison term after being convicted in 2012 of running a $7.2 billion Ponzi scheme. TD estimated reasonably possible losses from legal and regulatory actions including the Stanford litigation of between zero and C$951 million ($750 million) as of Oct. 31. Provisions related to legal action will be taken when a loss becomes probable and an amount can be reliably estimated, it said in its 2020 annual report.

A bankruptcy trustee recovered and distributed $12 million to thousands of creditors who were victims of a $332 million investment fraud, the South Florida Business Journal reported. Cassel Salpeter and Co. chairman and co-founder James S. Cassel, who was appointed director of 1 Global Capital's estate in bankruptcy court, said that about 3,750 creditors that invested in the company received a payment. To date, Cassel has recovered $124 million on behalf of 1 Global Capital victims, after distributing an initial $112 million payment to investors in 2019. Cassel said that the liquidating trust will continue to pursue actions to generate additional returns to creditors. Hallandale Beach-based 1 Global Capital, which provided loans to small businesses, filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2018. Soon after the bankruptcy filing, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed civil fraud charges against the company and former CEO Carl Ruderman, claiming they fraudulently raised $332 million from investors. According to the SEC lawsuit, 1 Global Capital overstated the value of investors’ accounts and their rate of returns and misappropriated at least $32 million to personally benefit Ruderman. Ruderman agreed to disgorge $32 million in ill-gotten gains and pay a $15 million civil penalty to settle the charges. Many of the scheme's victims were elderly individuals who invested between $50,000 and $100,000, Cassel said.