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Federal officials announced this week that a pair of Southwest Florida men was sentenced to 10.1 years and 11.25 years in federal prison, respectively, for their roles in a multistate scheme to defraud biodiesel buyers and taxpayers of more than $40 million.
Thomas Davanzo and Robert Fedyna, of Estero and Naples, respectively, fraudulently sold biodiesel credits and claimed tax credits for the sales, the Justice Department's Environmental and Natural Resources Division and the department's Middle District of Florida announced.
Both men also were ordered to forfeit more than $46 million and gold coins, jewelry, thoroughbred horses and property to the government.
“In pursuit of personal gain, the defendants perpetrated a multistate conspiracy that defrauded and undermined a federal program intended to further the energy independence of our nation,” says Assistant Attorney General John Cruden, in a statement.
He added the sentences were “just punishment for these serious crimes.”
Davanzo and Fedyna operated several shell companies that, together with co-conspirators at a Washington-based company, Gen-X Energy Group, and a Georgia firm known as Southern Resources and Commodities, generated a series of false transactions that purported to purchase renewable fuel and then transform the fuel back to feedstock, to be sold to Gen-X or Southern Resources for tax credits. The two men repeated the cycle several times, the government says.
The pair then laundered the proceeds of the scheme through another set of shell companies' bank accounts that they had established to conceal their fraud, and created false invoices and other paperwork, authorities alleged.
In all, Davanzo and Fedyna received at least $42 million from the sale of false fuel serial numbers to third parties between March 2013 and March 2014. Additionally, Gen-X received roughly $4.36 million in false tax credits, according to an investigation by the U.S. Secret Service, the Environmental Protection Agency's Criminal Investigation Division and the Internal Revenue Service's Criminal Investigation arm.
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