In the ongoing legal saga of the business conglomeration Nexus, formerly based in Augusta County, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau alleges that the company has violated court orders yet again. WMRA's Randi B. Hagi reports.
Two years ago, Nexus and three of its executives – married couple Michael Donovan and Richard Moore, and former Vice President of Operations Evan Ajin – were ordered by a federal judge to pay more than $811 million in restitution and penalties to the CFPB and multiple state governments. More than a quarter of that money was earmarked for the clients they had been found liable for deceiving and threatening in the immigration bond business. They quickly sold the Nexus companies for $3.50 to a Pennsylvania-based bail bondsman, Vincent Smith.
In March of this year, Chief U.S. District Judge Elizabeth K. Dillon ordered the corporate entities and Donovan and Ajin to be held in civil contempt, and declared the sale – which included protected customer information and contracts – void. Moore is currently in prison for federal tax evasion, and also hadn't signed the sale documents. The judge ordered the defendants to swear they accepted the denial of the sale and ordered Smith's company, Libre Immigration Services, or LIS, to destroy any consumer information it got from Nexus and give back any money it had collected from Nexus clients.
Donovan, Ajin, and Smith then filed affidavits saying they accepted the rescission of the sale – although, they all misspelled "rescission" the same way (as "recission"). Smith alleged that his company's client base is entirely new, and has never had access to Nexus customer information or contracts.
The CFPB wrote to the court last week that these claims were not credible, and that one of Nexus' alter-ego businesses, Subversivo, could also still be collecting on these coercive contracts. And, they included a sworn affidavit from a recent LIS employee who had formerly worked for Nexus. The recent employee claims that "LIS had been attempting to collect money from consumers who had signed contracts" with Nexus, and that a database of their information had been extracted by another LIS employee.
Judge Dillon has not yet responded to these filings.
In other Nexus news, Donovan, Moore, and a former employee are still slated to go to trial in Augusta County in October on charges of obtaining money by false pretenses, exploiting a mental incapacity, embezzlement, and conspiracy.
