Six days ago I wrote about a Florida/Vermont case in which an EB-5 developer's assets were frozen by court order.
Today's subject is a West Coast EB-5 middleman who is facing the same challenge. Life is never dull in the EB-5 cesspool.
The West Coast entrepreneur, however, has a certain negative cachet that the Floridian (Ariel Quiros) lacks — Tom Henderson of Oakland, Calif., also runs one of those call centers that makes irritating phone calls (usually at dinnertime). His people pitch the University of Phoenix, a for-profit educational institution. The center also makes calls for Deutsche Bank to sell something not known to me, for a total of 100,000 a day.
Henderson plays two roles in the EB-5 program, a situation accepted by the Department of Homeland Security. He is both the CEO of a DHS-licensed regional center, the San Francisco Regional Center, and is the developer/owner of several EB-5 projects, including the Oakland Tribune Tower and the phone operation CallSocket. Henderson is coping with several suits in the California courts, including the one from a former business partner, Alan Young, that led to his assets being frozen.
Quiros, in contrast, is one of the two developers of a set of EB-5 projects in Vermont, which are under the apparently nominal supervision of the Vermont Regional Center, a part of state government. The Securities and Exchange Commission, saying that $25 million in EB-5 moneys were missing, secured the seizure order against Quiros in the U.S. District Court in Miami.