A former Chicago real estate executive is facing up to five years in federal prison for hiding assets in a bankruptcy filing, the Chicago Sun-Times reported. Brett Immel was convicted on Aug. 26 by a federal jury in Chicago of fraudulently concealing income and bank accounts in his 2009 bankruptcy petition, according to the U.S. State’s Attorney’s Office of the Northern District of Illinois. In October 2009, Immel and his wife filed for joint chapter 7 bankruptcy in Illinois and sought to discharge more than $6 million in debts, prosecutors said. In his financial disclosures, Immel disclosed only a personal checking account that he was no longer using, prosecutors said. It held about $1,000. Meanwhile, Immel had been depositing thousands of dollars a month into two other accounts that he failed to list in his bankruptcy filing, prosecutors said. Immel used those two undisclosed accounts to pay nearly all of his personal expenses, including a home mortgage, lease payments on a luxury car, furniture purchases, shopping at high-end clothing stores, child and pet care expenses, and groceries, prosecutors said.
Models who promoted the Fyre Festival on social media and musicians who were booked to perform at the doomed music festival have been sued by a bankruptcy trustee who is attempting to recover payments they received from William “Billy” McFarland or companies he used to organize the event, the Wall Street Journal reported. Models Kendall Jenner and Emily Ratajkowski and performers Migos, Pusha T and Lil Yachty are among the big names sued Wednesday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York by trustee Gregory Messer, who has been investigating who got paid in the lead-up to the 2017 event that was supposed to take place over two weekends on an island in the Bahamas. The lawsuits seek to recover money paid to talent agencies, performers they represent and some vendors, including two companies that were paid to charter musicians to the festival on private jets and yachts. The litigation comes more than two years after investors who sank money into the event forced Fyre Festival LLC into bankruptcy in hopes of finding out where their money went. Jenner was allegedly paid $250,000 to promote Fyre Festival months before the event through a since-deleted Instagram post. She was paid another $25,000 days after making the post, the trustee alleges in one of the lawsuits. McFarland and his company, Fyre Media Inc., were also sued over $14 million allegedly transferred either to him, directly, or to Fyre Media from its bankrupt subsidiary formed to promote the festival. McFarland is serving a six-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to fraud charges.
