The United States Attorney's Office

BEVERLY HILLS MAN SENTENCED TO OVER 7 YEARS IN PRISON IN ‘BUST-OUT’ SCHEMES THAT CAUSED OVER $8 MILLION IN LOSSES

A Beverly Hills man who orchestrated a series of “bust-out” schemes in which several companies were taken over and their credit lines were exhausted was sentenced today to 87 months in federal prison.

Reza Bahram Tabatabai, 53, was sentenced by United States District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper, who also ordered the defendant to pay $2,235,801 in restitution.

Following a bench trial two years ago, Judge Cooper found Tabatabai  guilty of conspiracy, seven counts of interstate transportation of fraudulently obtained property, six counts of mail fraud, eight counts of wire fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering and 33 counts of money laundering.

A bust-out scheme is a fraud in which the identity and credit line of a business are used to obtain loans and goods with no intention of paying for the money or merchandise. In this case, Tabatabai, with the help of several others, purchased established businesses so they could make large purchases of goods using the companies’ existing lines of credit. While some payments were made in order to secure larger lines of credit, lenders to the four companies lost more than $8 million. The goods sold to the companies were re-sold at discounted prices to quickly generate profits for the participants in the scheme.

The companies busted out in the schemes run by Tabatabai were located in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, as well as the Santa Barbara, Denver and Atlanta metropolitan areas.

The investigation in this case started when the FBI received a complaint from a company that did business with Impaq Micro, a Norcross, Georgia company that had been a legitimate computer wholesaler until it was purchased by Tabatabai under an assumed name. As part of the sales agreement, the previous owners of Impaq Micro were prohibited from telling its vendors about the change in ownership. After purchasing the business, Tabatabai and his co-conspirators made efforts to increase the line of credit available to the business and then obtained a large amount of merchandise on the credit. The merchandise was shipped to a warehouse in California, and was sold in exchange for cash and cashiers checks. The banks never received payments on the line of credit. By the end of August 2004 – less than four months after Tabatabai and the others had taken over the company – Impaq Micro had been abandoned, leaving unpaid bills of approximately $3 million.

The evidence at trial showed that Tabatabai and his co-conspirators engaged in a series of complex monetary transactions to both conceal and promote the fraudulent scheme. Tabatabai controlled numerous bank accounts, held in the names of numerous businesses, in which he concealed the proceeds of the fraudulent conduct.

In a written verdict issued in 2006, Judge Cooper stated: “Defendant took pains to hide his identity while participating in the bust-out schemes, and utilized numerous bank accounts in assorted names to deposit his share of proceeds of the fraudulent transactions. The money trail was elaborate, complex, and clever, but ultimately it was unraveled by the IRS agents in charge of the investigation. It clearly revealed defendant’s participation in the creation, brief operation, and destruction of the companies, and his share of the ill-gotten gains.”

The investigation in this case was conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, IRS Criminal Investigation and the Beverly Hills Police Department.

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