A fifty-four-year-old Guyana-born banker, who had in December 2008 pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, was sentenced earlier this month to 37 months in prison by Judge David Hurd who also ordered that the sentence be followed by five years of supervised release.
In addition, the judge also ordered that Lal B. Singh pay US$3,610,538.24 jointly or severally with two other convicts in the case.
According to a March 4 statement from the office of United States Attorney for the Northern District of New York, Richard S. Hartunian the charge that Lal B. Singh pleaded guilty to stemmed from his employment at the Bank of New York in Manhattan where he served as a Section Manager in the Securities Redemption Department from 1993 to 2007. It was explained that the department acted as the transfer agent for customers seeking to redeem bonds that had been purchased and if customers did not redeem the bonds upon the maturity date, the additional interest payments on the bonds would be transferred into a pooled account for unclaimed funds.
The statement said if the funds were not claimed within three years, the bank is required to transfer these monies to the New York State Comptroller’s Office, Department of Unclaimed Funds. It was stated that through his position, Singh had access to a data base that allowed him to view the unclaimed funds and to determine which finds were soon to be transferred to the state.
His crime spree began in 1996 when he created requests to have funds transferred from Unclaimed Funds accounts to one of several other accounts that belonged to individuals who agreed to assist him in the fraudulent transactions. From that year to 2007, Singh was able to make 434 wires totalling more than US$3.6M to accounts controlled by others including Baldeo and Kamala Sahabir.
The statement said the Sahabirs are husband and wife who lived in the Schenectady area – the woman is also from Guyana while her husband is from Trinidad. When he pleaded guilty Singh became a prosecution witness and testified against the couple who were convicted following a jury trial held in a federal court last year August.
Hartunian’s statement said that between December 2000 and April 2003, alone, Singh made 66 wire transfers totaling over US$521,000 into a JP Morgan Chase account in the name of Baldeo Sahabir. After that account closed, the couple opened an account at the Bank of America in Rotterdam in the name of America Seva International. This was a self-proclaimed not-for-profit organization for assisting immigrants which was started by Kamala in Queens in 1996. From June 2003 to 2007, Singh made 282 wire transfer into the America Seva account totaling over US$2,400,000.
Last year the Sahabirs were sentenced to five years in prison after they were found guilty of money laundering and bank fraud and they have since appealed the sentence.
