After all said and done, embattled Air Peace Chairman & CEO Allen Onyema may escape jail time in the United States for the alleged financial fraud and money laundering crime he is being charged with, but he will be made to pay fines.
This was the perspective of a Nigeria born US based Attorney who said that Mr. Onyema’s offence was more of a civil transgression than criminal in nature. Below are his perspectives.
There are basically two sticking points the US tried to put out:
1. That he commingled charitable or non-profit organizations' money.
2. That he used his US formed limited liability companies to sell to another Air Peace and made money, which ought to have been taxed. Not sure he paid any taxes.
3. The transfers from the charitable accounts are illegal and he will be fined for it. Like I posted earlier, President Trump used money he raised from charitable contributions to buy art works and fund his hotel operations. He recently settled with New York AG and paid $2 million fine. NO JAIL TERM. It's essentially a civil infraction.
4. The letters of credit request from Fidelity to Wells Fargo and JP Morgan are normal. These clearly showed the sources of the funds and would not stick as criminal charges in the Courts. It's a kitchen sink strategy that piles on the heat but will generate zero fire.
5. The big one is that Allen bought the planes and resold them to Air Peace while building in $2 million profits on the sales. Because Allen may not have paid any taxes on those, the US will argue that those gains were laundered money. There are about $6 million of those and they will likely be forfeited.
Having written all these, the allegations in the indictment are all clearly very civil in nature and Allen's legal team will be able to quickly reach a settlement.
BAD NEWS: $6 million of those mark-ups sold to Air Peace will be taxed with statutory penalties. There will be a fine for commingling the charitable organizations' money. There will be civil penalties for not paying those assumed taxes in the year those deals were executed.
RESULT: That $14 million will not come back to ALLEN, but he is not going to jail.
KEN ORJI ESQ (United States-Based Attorney)
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