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A Jackson, Miss., man was indicted on Wednesday on charges that he defrauded his bankrupt business of more than $9 million, the Associated Press reported on Friday. Federal prosecutors say that after William "Butch" Dickson's company, Community Home Financial Services, filed for chapter 11 protection, he wired nearly $9.1 million from company accounts to a bank in Panama. Prosecutors say that he also sent mortgage checks that the company had collected to Central America. Prosecutors said Dickson was expelled from Panama on March 12, arrested on his return to the U.S., and ordered held without bond by a U.S. magistrate judge in Miami.

A onetime funder of Scott Rothstein's $1.2 billion Ponzi scheme has reached a settlement with the bankruptcy trustee of Rothstein's former law firm that will bring in roughly $400,000 to help repay creditors, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported today. The funder, Frank Preve, agreed to pay $65,000 in cash, give up the deed to a $350,000 house he owns in Cape Coral, Fla., and hand over a St. Thomas timeshare worth $56,000, according to a filing made on Tuesday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Fort Lauderdale. The overall settlement value of $471,000 falls short of the $5.06 million that chapter 11 trustee winding down the Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler law firm initially sought when he sued Preve three years ago.

Real estate developer Tim Blixseth was ordered to pay $41 million to creditors of the luxury Montana resort he helped drive into bankruptcy, by a federal judge who slammed the one-time billionaire for distorting the facts in the case, the Associated Press reported yesterday. Blixseth, former owner of the Porcupine Creek estate in Rancho Mirage, diverted more than $200 million from the Yellowstone Club for personal use — then sought to blame its 2008 financial collapse on others, including his ex-wife, Edra. But U.S. District Judge Sam Haddon said that Blixseth’s fraudulent transfers of money had been meticulously documented by Chief Bankruptcy Judge Ralph Kirscher, who first ordered him to pay the $41 million back in 2008. Haddon sharply criticized Blixseth’s attempts in the intervening years to shed responsibility in the case. The judge said Blixseth’s legal arguments were “intentionally misleading” and suffered from “startling disarray and confusion.”

Douglas Kelley, the trustee for bankrupt entities Ponzi scheme-operator Tom Petters once ran, asked a bankruptcy judge on Monday for permission to pursue clawback claims in 26 countries against recipients of money that Petters illegally obtained, the Wall Street Journal reported today. The list of affected countries — Australia, Bahrain, Canada, Ireland, Spain and Switzerland — spans the world, and Kelley said the number is expected to expand. In 2009, Petters was convicted of 20 counts of fraud and sentenced to 50 years in prison for perpetuating a Ponzi scheme that cost investors $3.5 billion. A bid to shorten his sentence to 30 years failed in December, with a federal judge in Minnesota calling the request “one final con” by a man “staring into the abyss of nearly 15,000 days of incarceration.”

A New York judge unsealed the records of six former Dewey & LeBoeuf employees who pleaded guilty in connection with accounting fraud at the law firm, Reuters reported on Friday. The records offer a fresh peek into the government's case against top executives at the defunct elite international law firm and how key witnesses might testify against them. The employees, who range from Dewey's controller to its billing director, agreed to cooperate with prosecutors who have targeted the firm's top management. Dewey's former chairman, Steven Davis, Executive Director Stephen DiCarmine and Chief Financial Officer Joel Sanders were charged March 6 with taking part in a scheme to cheat banks and investors as they struggled unsuccessfully to keep the law firm alive.

Former customers of Bernard Madoff will have recouped nearly $6 billion of their money if a federal bankruptcy judge approves the latest payout request by the trustee liquidating the swindler's firm, Reuters reported yesterday. Trustee Irving Picard yesterday said that he is seeking approval to pay out $349 million to fraud victims with 1,080 accounts, with payments ranging from $496 to $77.3 million. The bulk of the payout comes from Picard's $325 million settlement of claims against JPMorgan Chase & Co., once Madoff's main bank. Picard said that the payout would boost the total amount distributed to Madoff victims above $5.9 billion, including sums advanced by the Securities Investor Protection Corp, which oversees the liquidation of failed brokerages.

Federal prosecutors said that the former chief executive officer of Sentinel Management Group Inc. was found guilty yesterday of defrauding customers out of more than $500 million before the suburban Chicago firm collapsed in August 2007, Reuters reported yesterday. Jurors deliberated less than two hours in Chicago federal court before finding Eric Bloom guilty on 18 counts of wire fraud and one count of investment adviser fraud, following a four-week trial, the office of U.S. Attorney Zachary Fardon said. Each wire fraud count carries a maximum 20-year prison term plus a fine. The government is also seeking a forfeiture of more than $500 million.

Five former aides to Bernard Madoff, who spent decades working for his firm, were found guilty of helping run the biggest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history, a $17.5 billion fraud exposed by the 2008 financial crisis, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The three men and two women, hired by Madoff with little financial experience, were convicted on all counts. The defendants failed to persuade a federal jury in Manhattan they were ignorant of the fraud despite being part of the inner circle at his New York-based firm. Prosecutors began probing Madoff’s highest-ranking employees soon after his arrest. While the con man claimed to have carried out the fraud alone, several of his former workers later pleaded guilty, including his ex-finance chief, Frank DiPascali, who testified at the trial as the government’s key witness. The defendants are Annette Bongiorno, who ran the investment advisory unit at the center of the fraud; Joann Crupi, who managed large accounts; Daniel Bonventre, the ex-operations chief of Madoff’s broker-dealer; and computer programmers George Perez and Jerome O’Hara, accused of automating the scam as it grew rapidly in the 1990s.

Eric A. Bloom, chief executive officer of the failed investment firm Sentinel Management Group Inc., fraudulently misled its clients about how their assets were being used, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. “Sentinel was a fraud” led by Bloom, Assistant U.S. Attorney Patrick Otlewski said yesterday in U.S. District Court in Chicago. He asked for “the only verdict consistent with the evidence: a verdict of guilty on all counts.” Bloom was indicted in 2012 charges he and another man cheated at least 70 investors of more than $500 million through Sentinel, a suburban Chicago firm that managed short-term investments for commodity pools, hedge funds, a pension fund and other customers. Sentinel filed for bankruptcy in August 2007 days after Bloom told clients it was freezing their accounts due to financial market turbulence and saying some customers joined in the panic, Otlewski told the jury in his closing arguments. In fact, the firm had been using client assets as collateral for loans taken from the Bank of New York Mellon Corp., putting that money toward its heavily leveraged house trading account, Otlewski said.

Four years after President Obama promised to crack down on mortgage fraud, his administration has quietly made the crime its lowest priority and has closed hundreds of cases after little or no investigation, the Justice Department’s internal watchdog said on Thursday, The New York Times reported yesterday. The report by the department’s inspector general undercuts the president’s contention that the government is holding people responsible for the collapse of the financial and housing markets. In particular, the administration has been criticized for not pursuing large banks and their executives. The inspector general’s report shows that the FBI considered mortgage fraud to be its lowest-ranked national criminal priority. The FBI received $196 million from fiscal years 2009-11 to investigate mortgage fraud, the report said, but the number of pending cases and agents investigating them dropped in 2011. In 2012, the government reached a $25 billion civil settlement with the nation’s five largest mortgage servicers. Last year, the Justice Department announced a $13 billion settlement with JPMorgan Chase over the bank’s questionable mortgage practices. Members of Congress and others have criticized the Obama administration for going too easy on Wall Street banks and not taking mortgage fraud seriously enough.