Colombian prosecutors ask the U.S. to surrender the assets of David Murcia Guzman, head of Ponzi scheme DMG, and return them to Colombia, in order to compensate those who lost money, newspaper El Tiempo reported Tuesday.
David Murcia Guzman was the head of DMG which, according to Colombian authorities, was an organizational pyramid scheme that laundered money for local drug lords, by scamming investors.
When police shut down all of the company’s activities in late 2008 hundreds of thousands of Colombians lost their savings.
The lawyer representing DMG’s victims, Fernando Ruiz, made the return request via the Colombia’s prosecutor general. He asked that roughly $9.6 million dollars worth of Guzman’s assets be handed back to the Colombian government for re-distribution.
Ruiz believes the resources could help repay many of the company’s victims. He also remarked that he hopes that the goods go directly to the Prosecutor General’s Office and not the Superintendent of Societies that liquidated DMG.
In the last stage of the firms’ liquidation, $418 dollars was returned on average to the 73,000 persons who claimed they had invested in DMG.
The force behind the liquidation, Maria Mercedes Perry, said that those victims are the last of the group waiting to be repaid after nearly two years of liquidation.
“In total we started with 187,000 claimants, some of whom gave up to continue the process,” Perry explained.
Approximately, $13 million in cash, $3.4 million in goods, and $11.4 million in real estate has been appropriated.
Guzman is currently serving nine years in a U.S. prison for his crime of laundering millions of dollars.