President Donald Trump commuted the sentence of David Gentile, a private equity government who was convicted and sentenced to seven years in jail for a fraud scheme, in keeping with a White House official.
Gentile, the previous CEO and proprietor of GPB Capital Holdings, and Jeffry Schneider of Ascendant Capital, had been convicted in August 2024 on prices of securities and wire fraud. They had been sentenced in May. It doesn’t seem that Schneider’s sentence was commuted.
Gentile is the most recent white-collar defendant Trump has given a reprieve because the president has leaned into his clemency powers in his second time period. He has pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who pleaded responsible to a cash laundering cost in 2023; Ross Ulbricht, who had been serving a life sentence for creating the Silk Road market; and Trevor Milton, the founder of an electrical car startup who was sentenced to 4 years in jail for exaggerating the potential of his expertise.
NCS has reached out to Gentile’s lawyer for remark, in addition to to Breon Peace, the previous US legal professional for the Eastern District of New York who introduced the decision in 2024.
Trump’s pardon czar, Alice Johnson, posted on X 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 buyers’ personal funds to pay out month-to-month distributions to buyers as a substitute of placing them towards clients’ investments.
The Eastern District of New York wrote in a information launch in 2024 that Gentile and Schneider had been 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 stated.
“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.”