(CNN) — President Donald Trump commuted the sentence of David Gentile, a private equity executive who was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison for a fraud scheme, according to a White House official.
Gentile, the former CEO and owner of GPB Capital Holdings, and Jeffry Schneider of Ascendant Capital, were convicted in August 2024 on charges of securities and wire fraud. They were sentenced in May. It does not appear that Schneider’s sentence was commuted.
Gentile is the latest white-collar defendant Trump has given a reprieve as the president has leaned into his clemency powers in his second term. He has pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who pleaded guilty to a money laundering charge in 2023; Ross Ulbricht, who had been serving a life sentence for creating the Silk Road marketplace; and Trevor Milton, the founder of an electric vehicle startup who was sentenced to four years in prison for exaggerating the potential of his technology.
CNN has reached out to Gentile’s lawyer for comment, as well as to Breon Peace, the former US attorney for the Eastern District of New York who announced the verdict in 2024.
Trump’s pardon czar, Alice Johnson, in an internet post on Thanksgiving Day that she is “deeply grateful to see David Gentile heading home to his young children.”
Gentile and Schneider were charged in 2021 in what the US Securities and Exchange Commission described as a Ponzi-like scheme that raised over $1.7 billion. Prosecutors say they used investors’ own funds to pay out monthly distributions to investors instead of putting them toward customers’ investments.
The Eastern District of New York wrote in a news release in 2024 that Gentile and Schneider were convicted “for their roles in a multi-year scheme to defraud more than 10,000 investors by misrepresenting the performance of three GPB Capital private equity funds and the source of funds used to make monthly distribution payments to investors.”
The White House official defended Gentile’s actions at GPB Capital.
“Unlike similar companies, GPB paid regular annualized distributions to its investors. In 2015, GPB disclosed to investors the possibility of using investor capital to pay some of these distributions rather than funding them from current operations,” the official said.
“At trial, the government was unable to tie any supposedly fraudulent representations to Mr. Gentile,” the official added. “Mr. Gentile also raised serious concerns that the government had elicited false testimony and failed to correct such testimony.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt reiterated that statement at a press briefing on Monday, rejecting that Gentile was part of a Ponzi scheme.
“This is another example that has been brought to the president’s attention of the weaponization of justice from the previous administration, and therefore, he signed this commutation,” Leavitt told reporters.
The-CNN-Wire
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