Providenciales, 22 Jan 2015 – No comment for the media; David Smith who had been serving a six and a half year sentence on four counts of financial crimes namely: two counts of money laundering and two counts of conspiracy to defraud whisked his wife through the Provo International Airport terminal today bound for a private vehicle waiting to take them away from the spotlight. Smith has been incarcerated at the Her Majesty’s Prison in Grand Turk since 2010 and is due to complete a Federal sentence in the United States for similar crimes linked to a $220 million Ponzi scheme exposed in 2008; an Orlando court gave him 30 years. Smith was obviously thinner than when we last saw him; still with his signature beard and fresh off a flight out of the capital Grand Turk where he was released. Magnetic Media was told that he is finished his time for the Turks and Caicos; and what is next for the man who once headed Olint, a company founded in Jamaica is unclear. In 2013, the US Department of Justice advised individuals who had invested with Smith that they could make claims for compensation.
The report in the Jamaica Observer explains that a part of Smith’s criminal sentence was to forfeit assets seized by federal authorities. In 2011, David Smith was convicted in the US District Court for the Middle District of Florida on multiple counts of wire fraud and money laundering. Robert Di Pano, a NY, NJ and Florida attorney who writes frequently on financial crimes cases put the gravity of what David Smith, who is a TCI Belonger into perspective, saying and I quote: “Regardless of the outcome (in the Turks and Caicos), the severity of Smith’s US sentence looms large in the background.”
