Former Indian CEO sentenced to 5 years in prison for New Jersey fraud of $212 million, ordered to pay $125 million

Parmjit Parmar, a 55-year-old Indian-American man from New Jersey, was sentenced to five years in prison, followed by three years of supervised release, and a $125 million fine for participating in a large-scale conspiracy to defraud investors in connection with the purchase or sale of corporate securities. Palmer, also known as Paul Palmer, pleaded guilty in 2025.According to court documents, the fraud occurred between May 2015 and September 2017. Palma and his co-conspirators, including Sotirios Zaharis (aka “Sam Zaharis”) and Ravi Chivukula, orchestrated an elaborate scheme to defraud a private investment firm and others out of hundreds of millions of dollars in connection with the financing of a transaction to take a health services company publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange’s Alternative Investment Market.To fund the transaction, private investment firms contributed approximately $82.5 million and a consortium of financial institutions contributed an additional $130 million, for a total of approximately $212.5 million. The conspirators used fraudulent means to significantly inflate the value of the company and deceive others into believing that the company was worth much more than it actually was.Parma and the conspirators attempted to raise tens of millions of dollars in the public markets, purportedly to fund the company’s acquisition of various operating subsidiaries. In fact, many of these entities either do not exist or account for only a small portion of operating income. The conspirators channeled the proceeds from these secondary offerings through bank accounts they controlled and used the funds for various purposes unrelated to the acquisition of the alleged targets, court documents allege. The conspirators went to great lengths to make the funds appear to be income, creating false customers and altering bank statements to make the funds appear to come from customers.The court said Palma and his co-conspirators also forged and fabricated bank records of subsidiary entities to create a false picture of business revenue streams and made material misrepresentations and omissions to private investment companies and others.The conduct of Palma and his co-conspirators resulted in the victims valuing the company at more than $300 million for the purpose of financing a transaction to take the company private. The scheme was uncovered in September 2017, when Palma and his co-conspirators resigned from their positions at the company or were fired. On March 16, 2018, the company and its numerous affiliated entities filed for bankruptcy, attributing the company’s financial ruin in large part to a fraudulent scheme.