A former Texas bank president who issued millions of dollars in counterfeit loans over a decade and made a fire to try to cover up the fraud was sentenced Tuesday to eight years in prison, prosecutors said.
The woman, Anita Gail Moody, 57, pleaded guilty in June to conspiracy to commit bank fraud and arson.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Texas has said it will have to pay more than $ 11 million in restitution, which Enloe State Bank, which it manages, has lost.
Moody was president of the bank in Cooper, about 80 miles northeast of Dallas, and the fraud to which he pleaded guilty began in 2012.
In May 2019 – a day before the Texas Banking Department would conduct a review – Moody allegedly set a fire in the bank’s boardroom with files left on a table, according to prosecutors.
She has created more than 100 fraudulent loans over the years, prosecutors said in court documents.
She used some of the money on the business of her boyfriend and friends, for family and for her own lifestyle, including a Jeep. Other federal investigators said some loans were taken out to pay the interest and the interest on the others so that nothing was missing.
Moody “has experienced great remorse over these events and takes full responsibility for her actions,” her attorney, John C. Ginn, said in an email Tuesday night.
“She is ready to serve her sentence and will rectify as circumstances allow in the future,” he said.
Ginn argued in court documents that Moody had worked for the bank all her adult life, describing a life that was out of control, adding that she first borrowed the money out of sympathy, but in 2012 began using the loans for herself.
Acting U.S. Attorney Nicholas J. Ganjei said in a statement: “Criminal conduct affecting the financial health of a small, local moneylender can have a negative ripple effect throughout the community.”
The state bank department closed the bank, which was chartered in 1928, in 2019. The department said at the time that it was being forced to close it “due to abuse and fraud by former officials.”
A former bank vice president, Jeannie Swaim, pleaded guilty to a single count last year and was sentenced to two years in prison and ordered to pay more than $ 410,000 in compensation, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office and court records.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which insures deposits, was appointed as the recipient after the bank failed. A report from the agency’s deposit insurance fund was about $ 21 million, according to a report by the inspector general.
