| FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE November 16, 2007 WWW.USDOJ.GOV/USAO/CAN |
OAKLAND – United States Attorney Scott N. Schools announced that today United States District Judge D. Lowell Jensen sentenced Francis William (“Bill”) Reimers, 62, formerly of Danville, to 108 months in prison as a result of Reimers’s guilty pleas to mail fraud and money laundering. Judge Jensen also ordered Reimers to pay $9.6 million in restitution to the victims of his fraud schemes.
When Mr. Reimers pleaded guilty on March 23, 2007, Mr. Reimers admitted that he established an entity called Advisory Services Group (ASG), purportedly to provide financial and investment management services to individual investors. To persuade individuals to give Mr. Reimers control of the investors’ money, however, Mr. Reimers told these investors a series of false statements. For example, Mr. Reimers falsely stated that he had developed a “regression analysis” program that could predict whether mutual fund values would rise or fall; he falsely promised returns of at least 9%; he falsely stated that he would follow a conservative investment approach; and he falsely stated that he would invest his clients’ money.
Mr. Reimers admitted, however, that he did not invest these client funds. Instead, he used his clients’ money to pay his mortgage and to buy luxury cars, vacations, and hunting trips. He also used client money to fund two other businesses that Mr. Reimers owned and operated, Plan Compliance Group (PCG) and Univest Capital Management (UCM). PCG and UCM were created to handle third-party administration of 403(b) accounts of school employees (PCG) and third-party administration of benefits for federal government employees (UCM). As third-party administrators, PCG and UCM collected payroll distributions from thousands of employees and remitted them to institutional investment companies and to insurance providers, as directed by the employees. Mr. Reimers used PCG and UCM cash flow to pay off ASG investors who requested monthly dividends or who asked to close their account.
To perpetuate and to conceal his scheme, Mr. Reimers sent purported account statements to his clients. These account statements falsely reflected that his clients’ funds were invested in various mutual funds and tax-free money market funds. But the statements were fictitious; having never invested his clients’ money, their accounts existed only on paper. Even in 2000, when the stock market suffered a significant downturn, Mr. Reimers did not reflect that downturn on the fictitious account statements he sent to clients. This apparent success despite the market setback resulted in more referrals to Mr. Reimers.
On March 12, 2007, the United States Attorney’s Office charged Mr. Reimers by information, with six counts of mail fraud, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 1341, and one count of money laundering, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 1956(a)(1)(A)(i). Mr. Reimers pleaded guilty to all seven counts.
Judge Jensen ordered Reimers to report to federal prison on January 16, 2008.
Doug Sprague is the Assistant U.S. Attorney who is prosecuting the case with the assistance of legal assistant Katie Turner. The prosecution is the result of a 15-month investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigation.
Further Information:
Case #: CR 07-00133 DLJ
A copy of this press release may be found on the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s website at www.usdoj.gov/usao/can.
Electronic court filings and further procedural and docket information are available at https://ecf.cand.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/login.pl.
Judges’ calendars with schedules for upcoming court hearings can be viewed on the court’s website at www.cand.uscourts.gov.
All press inquiries to the U.S. Attorney’s Office should be directed to Natalya LaBauve at (415) 436-7055 or by email at Natalya.LaBauve@usdoj.gov.