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North Carolina investment firm founder Greg Lindberg, already convicted this year on bribery charges, pleaded guilty to a separate $2 billion fraud.

Lindberg, who founded Eli Global LLC, admitted in federal court in Charlotte on Tuesday that he bought a string of insurance companies in the past decade and then improperly invested nearly $2 billion. He defrauded thousands of policyholders to support a lavish lifestyle, prosecutors said. His plunder spurred one of the biggest individual fraud cases in the US.

Prosecutors said Lindberg used some of the money to pay for personal expenses like his credit cards, mortgages and a 214-foot yacht. He also paid an investigation firm to do research on women in his life and another firm to conduct surveillance of them, according to a February 2023 indictment.

Conspiracy Charges

Lindberg pleaded guilty to two of the 13 counts he faced: conspiracy to commit wire fraud, insurance business fraud and investment adviser fraud, and conspiracy to launder money.He faces as many as 20 years in prison.

As part of his plea, Lindberg agreed to help the insurance companies recover money for policyholders. He agreed to assist in identifying “billions of dollars of funds to make restitution to all policyholders and other entities,” according to a court filing.

Lindberg asked the judge to let him surrender to a halfway house near his home in Tampa, Florida, instead of to a jail so he could help with the asset recovery. He has eight children under the age of 7 who live with him, and his fianc茅e lives in Spain without a US visa, his lawyers wrote.

US Magistrate Judge David Keesler ordered his immediate detention and set a Nov. 21 hearing to determine whether he should go to a halfway house. The judge said he worried about the appearance of favorable treatment.

Dizzying Events

Lindberg had been separately indicted in 2019 for offering a bribe to the state insurance commissioner, who secretly recorded their conversations and cooperated with law enforcement authorities. Lindberg was convicted at trial of bribery and wire fraud and sentenced in 2020 to more than seven years in prison.

In 2022, a federal appeals court overturned his conviction and ordered a new trial, finding the lower-court judge had tainted the case by wrongly instructing the jury. Lindberg was released on bail and in May in a retrial, along with a consultant. He was indicted last year in the fraud he admitted to on Tuesday.

Lindberg, who grew up in a working-class family in San Mateo, California, attended Yale University, where he started his first company, which focused on research into the home care industry. Over time, the firm expanded through acquisitions and branched into business software, health care technology and financial services, renaming itself Global Growth in 2020, according to its . The firm has invested in more than 120 companies, with assets valued at more than $5 billion, the site says.

In September, US probation officials accused Lindberg of violating the terms of his release but didn’t specify how he did so.

Private Plane, Yacht

In 2019, prosecutors said Lindberg posed a risk of fleeing and shouldn’t be granted release on bond because he had a private plane and an oceangoing yacht, registered in the Cayman Islands. They said he had access to bank accounts in 18 countries, including Switzerland, Malta, Luxembourg and the UK.

He also had “significant relationships” with people in Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Poland and Belarus, while giving “millions of dollars to women from Kazakhstan and Russia,” the government said in a court filing.

Lindberg said at the time that he lived on his yacht and in rented apartments in New York and Beverly Hills.

The case is US v. Lindberg, 23-cr-48, US District Court, Western District of North Carolina (Charlotte).

Top photo: The Charlotte skyline. (Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg)

Topics Fraud