4:34 am UTC Dec. 15, 2020
A snowboarder glides in front of the Jay Peak Tram Haus Lodge in 2012.FREE PRESS FILE
Vermont’s Jay Peak ski resort was the site of the largest fraud in Vermont s history.
Ariel Quiros, the former owner, sold foreign investors and locals on a plan to transform the resort and the region into a year-round destination for wealthy outdoors enthusiasts. His business partner, Bill Stenger, raised more than $350 million from foreign investors. Investigators concluded Quiros misused $200 million and stole at least $50 million.
“It’s not like a traditional Ponzi scheme where there’s nothing to show for it, where it’s like Bernie Madoff. Bernie Madoff wasn’t building anything, he gave you an account statement that was bogus,” said Michael Pieciak, who investigated the scheme on behalf of the state of Vermont. “Here they were showing you here’s the hotel, here’s the new hotel, here’s the new construction, so it was a more complicated way
Snowed
A ski resort, a dream and greed: How a $350M fraud happened in Vermont’s poorest region
April McCullum and Dan D Ambrosio, Burlington Free Press
Published
3:22 pm UTC Dec. 18, 2020
No one would have recognized the man with icy eyes and a military bearing who drove through rural Vermont in 2007 with his lawyer in tow.
In anonymity, Ariel Quiros brought his real estate attorney, Fred Burgess, on a tour of the mountainous area near the Canadian border that’s known as the Northeast Kingdom. Laced with lakes and expansive forests, the Kingdom, as locals call it, is a silent fortress of natural beauty, hardscrabble dairy farms, and people eager for a return to prosperity.