The former board member of a Tempe-based Islamic charity has been sentenced to 14½ years in prison and ordered to pay more than $3 million restitution for bilking members of the group in an investment scheme, Attorney General Tom Horne said today.
Tempe resident Mohammad Reza Amin-Sobhani (also know as Robert Amini), 61, a former board member of the Al-Mahdi Benevolent Islamic Foundation of Arizona, was sentenced by Judge Warren Granville of the Maricopa County Superior Court to 14.5 years in state prison followed by five years of supervised probation.
Additionally, Amin-Sobhani was ordered to pay more than $3.2 million in restitution to victims of the so-called affinity fraud.
The attorney general said Amin-Sobhani used his standing in Islamic group to convince other organization members to invest money into an entity he owned called Expert Development & Investment, promising low-risk investment opportunities with high interest returns.
People are also reading…
While he portrayed Expert Development as a lucrative, multi-million dollar company involved in high-profit ventures like commercial real estate and luxury aircraft sales, investigators found those claims to be false, the attorney general said.
Amin-Sobhani was charged with multiple felony counts of fraud, securities fraud and the sale of unregistered securities.