Wife, Ana Isabel Pereira Garcia, and sister of Oswaldo Villalobos consider verdict.

Individual cases of people who lost the $10,000 minimum and with it their life savings also cast Luis Enrique Villalobos in a very bad light and led the judges to increase the charges from fraud to aggravated fraud against Oswaldo Villalobos. Despite the overwhelming North American clientele, Costa Ricans with limited financial experience also invested. One woman, who wanted the interest income for cancer treatment, was startled when she was given a Bible and asked for her money back. She was told that having already signed, she’d have to wait 30 days to withdraw her principal, judges said.

The most heinous swindle, cited by the judges, refers to a Limón resident who had received an insurance settlement after her husband was killed by a truck. She planned to use it to build a house to replace her dirt-floor shack, and gave it to Luis Enrique Villalobos in the meantime. This was after the raid on the Mall San Pedro offices July 4, 2002, when the investment scheme was in collapse, but the firm took her money anyway.

Oswaldo’s role was as a facilitator of the circular money movements, among the more than 20 shell corporations, most with officers uninvolved in their operation and many with no economic activity whatsoever.

For the judges, all attempts to suggest that the money capture operated by Luis Enrique and the Ofinter exchange house run by Oswaldo were separate entities ran afoul of evidence and testimony that described shared phone lines, payroll, and even prayer sessions. The original charge of illegal banking was basically subsumed into the fraud conviction.

Pérez said the structure was “not a Ponzi scheme, it was a Villalobos scheme.”

Oswaldo Villalobos was found innocent on a charge of money laundering. The judges declared that specific knowledge of the invested money’s illicit source was required for that crime. While the investment scheme provided an ideal environment for money laundering, there was no evidence that the Villalobos knew of the source of the funds given to them or even asked.

A visit by Canadian drug traffickers who were presumed to be investing was the pretext for the July 2002 police raid that led to the shutdown of the operation nearly four months later.

Porras closed by saying to the accused that what he and his brother had done not only affected the victims directly, but damaged “Costa Rica’s image in the world.”

Defense lawyer Rodrigo Araya said the defense team still is positive about the case and hope on appeal to reduce the sentence. He noted that only two of the original five charges led to the jail time.

Fraud prosecutor Ilem Meléndez left through a back entrance and was not available for comment. Prosecutor Walter Espinoza did not appear. Espinoza is notably camera-shy and presumably wished to avoid the assembled media.

By the time Oswaldo Villalobos was led away in handcuffs the crowd of supporters had thinned considerably and much of the media was gone.