New England Jay Peak/Burke: It is finally hitting the fan.

[AaronFM]

The sad thing is, I am pretty sure he will end up looking like one of the 'good guys' who were 'fooled'... no one in this innocent. These were all savvy people who had to know what was going on, they just didn't care until it started to affect them.

Starting to look a lot less innocent.
GOVERNOR’S OFFICE ASKS THAT OLD EMAILS OF FORMER TOP AIDES BE DESTROYED

 

[Erik Timmerman]

Oh boy, I knew it!

 

[quant]

What isn't answered yet is a basic question: What was the end game in the grand scheme? Usually, it is more new investors will cover the funds spent by the fraudsters (Ponzi), no one will notice, the fraud will be covered by selling off other assets that appreciated in value, the business will be sold to suckers, the fraudsters will skip town, or whatever.

What was the end game?

 

[Mike Thomas]

South Park addressed this in an episode-

Step 1: Collect Underpants
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit.

It isn't a very good business plan, but what the heck.

The new vtdigger.org article... one of the main people in it is a really good friend of mine. That sucks, but she is a very smart person and, well, she had to know exactly what was going on. Another friend of mine is in grad school at Yale (hey, I said I was dumb, not my friends...), she was telling me one of her law professors discussed the EB5 program. He spent quite a bit of time discussing VT and how the state was really overstepping the bounds of the program... again, any smart person should have seen this coming from a mile away.

 

[Lorenzzo]

I can't imagine how the USCIS Green Card Through Investment Program might be subject to abuse. Just because foreigners are essentially able to buy citizenship by investing $500,000/$1,000,000 as approved on an I-526 form by government officials?

I wouldn't have seen this coming.

 

[SBrown]

I can't imagine how the USCIS Green Card Through Investment Program might be subject to abuse. Just because foreigners are essentially able to buy citizenship by investing $500,000/$1,000,000 as approved on an I-526 form by government officials?

I wouldn't have seen this coming.

 

[Erik Timmerman]

Stenger is definitely every bit as dirty as Quiros.

http://vtdigger.org/2016/04/20/seni...-him-new-investors-would-fund-prior-projects/

 

[Muleski]

Is that a shocker? I caught up with three friends in Burlington on Monday. Pretty savvy, well connected guys. Skiers. There has been talk of this since day one, and it heated up the moment Q father and Q son were involved. Just a huge fraud. Two of them were saying that Stenger was neither ski genius nor ski visionary.....he's a fraud, and a thief.

I terms of who ends up with the two properties, at at what eventual price, who knows?

Sad.

 

[Crank]

My first time skiing Jay Peak was in 1985. That was Stenger's first year there as well. Two things he did that helped make Jay what it is today...or at least what it was before they stated building new hotels, lodges, skating rinks and indoor water parks.

1, Opened up border to border skiing, actively encouraging skiers to get into the woods and cutting numerous glades. To my knowledge, Jay Peak was the first area in VT to do this. At that time, I believe, Paradise at MRG was an unmarked off the map, area and MRG may also have allowed/encouraged tree skiing. I am not enough of a Stowe skier to know what their evolution/policies were, but the 80's were a time when ski areas were very concerned with liabilities and would cut down any fun terrain feature and over-groom to dumb down difficulty of many trails. Everyone wanted to be Okemo. My second trip to Jay in February there were no glades cut, yet some patrollers encouraged my brother in law and I to explore the woods off Uller's Dream, now known as Beaver Pond Glade. They basically told us there was no way to get lost as we would hit the xc trail at the bottom that would lead us right back to the base area. We had those woods to ourselves all week...not so much today.

2, Jay Peak's marketing hammered the Jay Cloud and nothing but the Jay Cloud for years. Smart marketing if you ask me. Don't know if that came from Stenger or the highly regarded marketing guy, Steve Wright who is now the defacto/interim? general manager.

For me the charm of Jay was it's focus on skiing and it's isolated position that made it a sleepy, hidden gem of a ski area. I have never begrudged their growth and seeming success, however, I miss my old Jay Peak. Just and old crank am I.

 

[Erik Timmerman]

Here's a whole different take on this disaster.

http://www.skitheeast.net/zanders-take-biased-for-bill-eb5000/

 

[x10003q]

My first time skiing Jay Peak was in 1985. That was Stenger's first year there as well. Two things he did that helped make Jay what it is today...or at least what it was before they stated building new hotels, lodges, skating rinks and indoor water parks.

1, Opened up border to border skiing, actively encouraging skiers to get into the woods and cutting numerous glades. To my knowledge, Jay Peak was the first area in VT to do this. At that time, I believe, Paradise at MRG was an unmarked off the map, area and MRG may also have allowed/encouraged tree skiing. I am not enough of a Stowe skier to know what their evolution/policies were, but the 80's were a time when ski areas were very concerned with liabilities and would cut down any fun terrain feature and over-groom to dumb down difficulty of many trails. Everyone wanted to be Okemo. My second trip to Jay in February there were no glades cut, yet some patrollers encouraged my brother in law and I to explore the woods off Uller's Dream, now known as Beaver Pond Glade. They basically told us there was no way to get lost as we would hit the xc trail at the bottom that would lead us right back to the base area. We had those woods to ourselves all week...not so much today.

2, Jay Peak's marketing hammered the Jay Cloud and nothing but the Jay Cloud for years. Smart marketing if you ask me. Don't know if that came from Stenger or the highly regarded marketing guy, Steve Wright who is now the defacto/interim? general manager.

For me the charm of Jay was it's focus on skiing and it's isolated position that made it a sleepy, hidden gem of a ski area. I have never begrudged their growth and seeming success, however, I miss my old Jay Peak. Just and old crank am I.

Jay might have gone to border to border glades first, but there are glades on the 1970s Killington maps (Downdraft, Big Dipper, Pipe Dream ) and Stowe has a section called Glades on maps from at least 1980 or 1981 above Nose Dive. MRG had Paradise on early 1980s maps. Okemo was not yet Okemo as there was a section on the upper mountain called Glades - there were 3 gladed trails to the left off the summit double. I think most areas in the Northeast had 'trails' that were glades long before it became a major focus at Jay.

 

[Crank]

Yes but... glades back in the day were usually a few islands of trees left here and there in a cut trail. I am wondering when Paradise was first put on the map? I seem to remember skiing MRG in the early 80's and it being a fabled run through the trees somewhere over there.

Okemo had a good start on becoming what it is today by '85/86. Muellers took over in '82. Never was a ton of challenge there anyway..other than the old poma launch...I mean lift. Not to mention good old fashioned Vermont boilerplate conditions.

 

[James]

Trees at Okemo? The Muellers don't care about trees. They don't even have the fallen dead ones removed in the trail.

 

[steamboat1]

Yes but... glades back in the day were usually a few islands of trees left here and there in a cut trail.

Downdraft & Big Dipper at Killington were certainly not a few islands of trees left here & there in a cut trail when they first opened in 1960. They were on the map too. Big Dipper stayed pretty much in it's original form until Killington installed the Canyon chair in 1992. I don't recall which year they cut Downdraft to make it an open trail.

 

[Crank]

Were they originally glades? From what I remember skiing there and from what the trail map shows Downdraft and Big Dipper are nice, steep runs coming straight down the canyon. Have to admit I am not a big K fan, but I have skied there at least a dozen or so days between the 70's and this century. I have skied some trees there, but never back in the day so to speak.

 

[steamboat1]

Were they originally glades?

Yes both trails were originally glades. The only cut trail from the peak into the Canyon was Cascade.

 

[Erik Timmerman]

VTDigger has a good article that explains how this went down from the beginning. http://vtdigger.org/fullimagestory/jay-peaks-path-fraud/

“It’s terrible what that son of a bitch did. I will — when this SEC gets over with, I’m going to go over after that man, I promise you. I will kill that man for what he did,” Quiros said.

 

[SBrown]

VTDigger has a good article that explains how this went down from the beginning. http://vtdigger.org/fullimagestory/jay-peaks-path-fraud/

“It’s terrible what that son of a bitch did. I will — when this SEC gets over with, I’m going to go over after that man, I promise you. I will kill that man for what he did,” Quiros said.

I am trying to read the article, but whose idea was it to publish in that font??? My eyes, my eyes... that's too hard to read.

 

[mdf]

About Vermont glades...
when I started skiing Killington in the early 80's, Big Dipper was still a glade. The difference between that and modern woods was that it was the only legal -- or at least the only marked -- tree skiing on the mountain. And it had a rope line in the woods, marking how far over you were supposed to go.

Over at Mad River Glenn, Paradise was an open secret, but it was not on the trail map and not strictly legal.

 

[James]

The mobile version is fine for readability.

From the article-
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Michael Gibson, a registered financial EB-5 advisor who has written extensively about the immigrant investor program, says that if the state had reviewed the financials from the beginning, “They would have discovered in one hour or less, the misappropriation of funds.”

“This fraud went on almost 10 years, to me that’s unconscionable,” Gibson said.

Investors say they were drawn to the Northeast Kingdom EB-5 developments because the state of Vermont was charged with monitoring the projects, and the backing of prominent politicians gave the projects an air of respectability and safety. Both Leahy and Shumlin, for example, wrote letters of support for the Jay Peak projects and the AnC Bio Vermont biomedical campus, which the SEC alleges is “nearly a complete fraud.”

In all, about 700 foreign investors from 74 countries were duped. It’s not clear whether they will recover their money, and several hundred investors who are in the middle of the immigration process may not be able to obtain residency in the United States as a result of the alleged fraud.

Mohammed Adil, an Indian investor who is a CEO of a company in Dubai, said “For someone sitting so far away, the governor’s promise means something.”

Adil, an investor in the Stateside project at Jay Peak, says he was attracted to the EB-5 program in Vermont because he thought it would be a safe investment.

“I come from a country where citizens cannot always count on the government and corruption abounds,” Adil wrote in a letter to Sen. Patrick Leahy. “But America is supposed to be different, that is why we are so trusting in giving over our savings to Vermont, knowing it would be protected by the appropriate state and federal agencies.”

Adil holds a degree from Harvard University and he brought his family to the United States to give his four daughters an opportunity to obtain a first class education. Now, he doesn’t know if his families’ applications for permanent residency have been jeopardized by the fraud, let alone whether he’ll get his money back.
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