The One About The Defrauding Pastor

When you run across someone trying to get you to invest risk-free with a high annual return, you know you have run into a fraudster. Unless god is on the side of the investment, there is no such thing as a high-rate, risk-free return.

Apparently, Larry Holley, the pastor of Abundant Life Ministries in Flint, Mich., thought he could cloak his securities in god’s will and pass them off to parishioners.

According to the SEC complaint, Holley and his associate Patricia Enright Gray, used faith-based rhetoric, with references to scripture and biblical figures to pitch fraudulent promissory notes from a real estate company. From February 2015 until recently, approximately 83 individuals invested with pair.

Holley labeled his church as a “place of provision” and “distributors of knowledge, wisdom, wealth & substance.” To be fair to the pastor, it looks he and the church had spent time buying and fixing up homes for those in need. It just seems he crossed the line at some point.

Holley allegedly told prospective investors that as a person who “prayed for your children,” he was more trustworthy than a “banker” with their money. He held financial presentations masked as “Blessed Life Conferences” at churches. As part of the presentation he asked congregants to fill out cards with information on their finances and he promised to pray over the cards.

Apparently, he turned over the financial information to Gray for the hustle and she would have a on-on-one meeting to help them become millionaires. During the consultations, Gray showed prospective investors a large book filled with photographs of what she represented to be some of real estate company’s properties, testimonials from satisfied investors and copies of checks paid to investors.

The real estate company, Treasure Enterprise, did exist and did own some real estate. The company did not invest the money fast enough or profitably enough to meet the payments on the promissory notes. Perhaps the goal was legitimate at first. (I don’t know.) When Treasure missed its investment marks, Holley and Gray could have broken the news to investors. Instead, it looks like they increased their fundraising efforts to cover the shortfall. (Which of course just increases the shortfall.) The pair used payments of the fresh capital to payoff earlier investors in exchange for dropping their complaints to regulators.

As of February 2017, Treasure was past due on approximately 51 promissory notes for 43 investors, totaling nearly $2 million.

The State of Michigan had caught up with them before the SEC. The Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs used a cease and desist order in August for selling unregistered securities, from acting as unregistered agents and from making false or misleading statements in the offer and sale of securities. Unlike the SEC, Michigan can put them in jail.

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