A founder and executive director of the now-defunct Aegis Co., which marketed and sold sham domestic and foreign trust packages to hundreds of wealthy U.S. clients, was sentenced to 18 years in prison.
The company official, Michael A. Vallone, and five co-defendants were convicted in May of participating in a nearly decade-long scheme to divert income from businesses into sham trusts for clients, hiding hundreds of millions of dollars in income for those clients and resulting in a $60 million tax loss to the United States. The government said the case is one of the largest of its kind.
