NEW YORK (AP) – Charlie Javice, the founder of a starting company trying to improve how to apply for financial help students, was sentenced on Monday to more than seven years in prison for cheating JPMorgan Chase from $ 175 million by exaggerating how much students it served.
Javice, 33, was convicted in the Federal Court of Manhattan for her conviction in March by Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein, who said that she committed “a big fraud” by the bank giant in the summer of 2021. She made false records that had the company, Rank, Frank, had more than 4 million customers when it had less than 300,000, found Hellerse, Hellerse, Hellerstein.
The judge said that Javice had collected a “very powerful list” of her charity campaigns, including the organization of soup kitchens for homeless people when she was 7 years old and designs career programs for previously locked up women.
In court papers, lawyers noticed that Javice has had to deal with extraordinary public control, reputation destruction and professional exile, “to make her a household name” in the same way as Elizabeth Holmes became synonymous with her blood test company, Theranos.
Lawyer Ronald Sullivan said Hellerstein that his client was very different from Holmes, because what she created actually worked, in contrast to Holmes, “who had no real company” and whose product “in fact threatened patients”.
When looking for a 12-year prison sentence for Javice, prosecutors mentioned a text of 2022 that sent Javice to a colleague in which she called it 'ridiculous' that Holmes was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison.
Hellerstein largely rejected arguments that he should be flexible because the acquisition “a 28-year-old versus 300 investment bankers of the largest bank in the world” put it, as Sullivan put it.
Yet the judge criticized the bank and said: “They are faulted a lot of themselves” after they did not succeed in doing enough due diligence. However, he soon added that he “punished her behavior and not the stupidity of JPMorgan.”
Sullivan said the bank hurried its negotiations because it feared that another bank would first acquire Frank.
A public prosecutor, Micah Fergenson, said that JPMorgan “did not get a functioning company” in exchange for his investment. “They have acquired a crime scene.”
Fergenson said that Javice was powered by greed when she saw that she could $ 29 million dropped from the sale of her company.
“Mrs. Javice let it dangle for her and she lied to get it,” he said.
Javice, given an opportunity to speak, said that she was “haunted that my failure has transformed something meaningful into something notorious.” She said she “made a choice that I will regret all my life.”
