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Florida insurance broker Heleonel Gonzalez will be sentenced in February after he agreed to plead guilty to bank fraud for orchestrating a $6 million scheme to defraud the $1 billion Peach State Federal Credit Union in Lawrenceville, Georgia, the U.S. Attorney in Atlanta said Wednesday.
Gonzalez signed a plea deal with prosecutors, which requires him to pay at least $3.5 million in restitution and forfeit a Park City, Utah three-bedroom house listed for $749,000, according to Zillow.com.
From January 2023 to January 2024, Gonzalez, 48, of Miami Lakes, carried out the fraud scheme that involved P1 Finance, a division of Peach State FCU. P1 loans money to commercial borrowers, such as condominium associations, that use the loan funds to pay the premiums on property and casualty insurance policies.
Gonzalez owned and operated Sharp Insurance Agency in Miami Lakes.
On at least 20 occasions, for the purpose of influencing the actions of Peach State, Gonzalez falsely represented to P1 Finance that a customer of Sharp Insurance Agency authorized him to apply for a premium-financing loan on the customer’s behalf, according to court documents.
He then signed and submitted to P1 Finance a Premium Finance Agreement and Disclosure Statement. But the document falsely represented that Sharp Insurance Agency, as the agent of Citizens Property Insurance Corporation in Jacksonville, Fla., had issued a property and casualty insurance policy to the customer and that the policy was then in force and effect.
Federal prosecutors said the insurance broker fraudulently represented that the loan proceeds advanced by P1 Finance would be used to pay the premiums on a policy and for no other purpose.
But Gonzalez knew these representations were false.
After Peach State issued approximately $6 million in loans to Gonzalez, he used the funds to pay personal debts and expenses, court documents showed.
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