Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of EZjet Air Services, Sonny Austin Ramdeo faces up to 60 years in jail on three counts of wire fraud, with a mandatory fine of US$250,000.
The former Guyanese resident of Windsor Forest, West Coast Demerara, appeared Thursday at before a New York court, accused of stealing US$20M from a hospital chain over a seven-year period.
They charged him with a US$20 million federal payroll tax fraud scheme.
Some of the monies he is accused of stealing were said to be used to finance the operations of EZjet, a chartered airline that he started up last year December, according to prosecutors. He remains in jail in New York without bail.
The Federal agents said that Ramdeo kept the money paid by Promise and Success Healthcare to his private company, PayServ, for his personal use.
Ramdeo is expected to be removed to the Southern District of Florida on these charges.
According to the indictment, as early as September 3, 2010, and continuing through on or about October 12, 2012, at Boca Raton, Palm Beach County, in the Southern District of Florida, and elsewhere, Ramdeo devised a scheme to defraud the hospitals by stealing the payroll taxes.
He did this by establishing a company called Payserv Tax Inc. which he claimed, using false emails, was a subsidiary of Ceridian Corporation, a well known company that once did payroll services for the hospitals. It was based on this claim that the hospitals trusted him and Payserv with millions of dollars. Using this authority, he routinely transferred money from the hospitals to his Payserv accounts.
In early November, EZjet had its licence revoked by the US Department of Transportation after Swift Air, an Arizona-based aircraft company, complained that the low-cost charter owed them a significant sum of money. Guyana, Trinidad and Toronto, Canada followed suit.
Workers walked out of the New York office not long after leaving passengers unsure how they would get back hundreds of thousands of US dollars.
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