“When we had the opportunity to welcome him to our team, I was delighted. He’s a perfect fit.,” said the company’s founder and CEO. A year later their criminal enterprise was shut down by the SEC.
Source: Washington Post
In July 2020, a small Florida-based investment firm announced that a man named George Devolder had been hired as its New York regional director. “When we had the opportunity to welcome him to our team, I was delighted,” the company’s founder and chief executive said in a news release. “He’s a perfect fit.”
Devolder is now better known as George Santos, the 34-year-old freshman Republican congressman from New York’s 3rd Congressional District who brazenly lied to voters about key details of his biography. And the company for which he was “a perfect fit,” Harbor City Capital, is no longer in operation. Its assets were frozen in 2021, when the Securities and Exchange Commission accused it of running a “classic Ponzi scheme” that had defrauded investors of millions of dollars.
The SEC complaint did not name Santos, who has denied knowledge of the alleged wrongdoing.
Santos wasn’t named, so that’s the end of the story, right? Not exactly.
When the company was shuttered in 2021, after allegedly collecting a total of $17.1 million from more than 100 individuals, Santos joined Harbor City executives in creating other businesses and political consultancies now under scrutiny after his election to Congress, according to business registration documents.
The Post’s examination found new details about how Santos came to work at Harbor City, and it revealed that Santos remained at the company long after a prospective investor told him the firm was using a fraudulent bank document.
Like Trump, he just moves from one criminal enterprise to another. In this latest iteration, Santos in the U.S. Congress can still do real damage and certainly someone as weak and as corrupt as Kevin McCarthy isn’t going to stop him.
