Law grad gets 6 years for Ponzi scheme said to have cost investors $9.2M
Updated: Only last year, it seemed that Neal Goyal was living large because of his remarkable success in business. He had just begun working in a luxurious corner office on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, he was residing with his family in a $1.5 million home, and he took his employees on an all-expenses-paid trip to the Dominican Republic..
But the claimed hedge-fund profits that fueled his lifestyle didn’t exist, prosecutors say. In fact, after graduating from the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in 2006 and purporting to invest funds from family, friends and others, Goyal simply lived on the money and poured it into businesses operated by relatives, not even making any trades in some funds for a substantial period of time, the Chicago Tribune (reg. req.) reports. Meanwhile, he rewarded workers for a claimed 50 percent return in 2013 with the Dominican Republic trip.
Then in May 2014 he was federally charged with wire fraud, as a press release by the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Northern District of Illinois details. His scheme cost investors about $9.2 million, prosecutors said.
“I chose ego over truth,” Goyal wrote in a letter to U.S. District Judge Matthew Kennelly.
He has pleaded guilty, and prosecutors asked that the 34-year-old get at least 10 years in prison. On Thursday, he was sentenced to 6 years.
Most of those he defrauded, hoping to recoup their losses, had asked the judge to spare Goyal from prison time.
Updated at 5:20 p.m. to include news of prison sentence.
