The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has charged two more Florida executives with participating in a truck investment venture that allegedly bilked investors out of $112 million.
Ricardi Celicourt, 40, of Coconut Creek, and Brisly Guillaume, 39, of Boynton Beach, were named in a lawsuit filed by the SEC on Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. The lawsuit charges both with violations of securities registration and broker-dealer registration provisions.
The SEC’s complaint alleges that over a more than two-year period — April 2021 until June 2023 — Celicourt and Guillaume helped raise nearly $109 million from 1,500 investors, mainly from Haitian-Americans, through an unregistered securities offering by Royal Bengal Logistics (RBL) of Coral Springs, Florida.
Read related story here: Florida trucking company owner accused in $100M Ponzi scheme
According to the complaint, Celicourt, who was RBL’s vice president of business development and investor relations, and Guillaume, who was director of business development and investor relations for the trucking and logistics firm, sold investments to the investing public. The SEC claims neither had been registered as brokers or dealers or associated with a registered broker-dealer. Court documents also state that the two executives received approximately $1.3 million in transaction-based bonuses for their roles in the alleged Ponzi scheme.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s SAFER website states that Royal Bengal Logistics’ common carrier authority was granted in August 2018 before its authority was involuntarily revoked after the SEC shut down the company with a restraining order in August 2023. Prior to its closure, the company purportedly had 91 drivers and 166 power units.
RBL offered four investment opportunities, including short- and long-term investment programs. A minimum of $25,000 was required for the company’s short-term investment. Its long-term owner financing program required a minimum investment of $60,000.
According to court documents, RBL also offered a trailer program with a minimum investment of $50,000 and a $55,000 investment for its truck program that the company “purportedly used toward the purchase of a semi-truck on behalf of the investor.”
Man behind the plan
In June 2023, FreightWaves reported that the U.S. Department of Justice had arrested and charged Sanjay Singh, 43, of Coral Springs, with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud and engaging in transactions in unlawful proceeds.
According to the DOJ release, over a three-year period, beginning in January 2020 until the time of his arrest, “Singh and his co-conspirators held RBL out to potential investors as a thriving and successful trucking business, all while RBL’s actual trucking business lost money.”
The indictment stated that Singh and his co-conspirators “made material misrepresentations and material omissions about the riskiness of investing in RBL, the profitability of RBL’s trucking operations, how RBL would pay its investors, and how RBL would use investor funds.”
Federal investigators also alleged Singh had misappropriated millions of dollars of investor funds to “renovate his home, make mortgage payments, pay for personal expenses and trade on margin,” according to court documents.
The SEC also filed a complaint against Singh in June 2023, accusing him of fraudulently raising approximately $112 million from investors in an alleged Ponzi scheme. The complaint states that Singh, through RBL, “offered and sold investors high-yield investment programs that purportedly generated 12.5% percent to 325% in guaranteed returns.”
Singh and RBL “promised investors the company would use their money to expand Royal Bengal’s operations and increase its fleet of semi-trucks and trailers,” according to the complaint. Singh and others “assured investors that these investment programs were safe, and that Royal Bengal generated $1 million in revenue per month and had a fleet of over 200 semi-trucks and growing, according to court documents. In reality, the SEC alleged, Royal Bengal has operated at a loss “and used approximately $70 million of new investor funds to make Ponzi-like payments to other investors.”
Singh allegedly misappropriated nearly $14 million of investor funds for himself and others, “who did not provide any legitimate services in exchange for those investor funds” and “allegedly diverted more than $19 million of investor funds to two brokerage accounts he controlled, engaged in highly speculative equities trading on margin in those accounts, and as a result, lost more than $1 million of investor money,” according to the SEC.
On July 17, Singh’s attorney, Victor Van Dyke, the assistant federal public defender assigned to his case, filed a pretrial motion that seeks to exclude “all evidence and argument related to Royal Bengal Logistics’ pending SEC case and all evidence and argument related to business losses incurred by investors after the date Royal Bengal Logistics entered receivership,” the motion states.
Singh’s jury trial is set for Oct. 7 in U.S. District Court in Fort Lauderdale.
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