Jeff Parsons clams up
The Internal Revenue Service wants to talk to embattled entrepreneur Jeffrey Parsons, who does not appear to be in a talking mood.
The U.S. attorney’s office in Houston last month asked a federal judge to enforce a summons issued to Parsons by the IRS last summer in Texas, where Parsons moved in 2013, leaving a trail of lawsuits and unpaid creditors behind in Springfield. The government, which is owed millions of dollars in unpaid taxes, wants to see Parsons’ financial records, but he didn’t respond to the summons.
On a separate matter, Parsons is due in federal court in Springfield Dec. 3 at a hearing to determine whether $500 per month is an appropriate amount for him to pay former employees who won a $12.3 million award after they sued, claiming that they’d been shorted on wages.
Parsons made and blew a fortune buying and selling valuables, particularly precious metals, at buying events set up across the nation, typically in hotels. He bounced checks, stiffing both customers and employees, and left various bills unpaid before filing for bankruptcy in 2012 and moving to Texas the following year. His lawyer has said that he is the target of a criminal investigation.
Parsons’ answers were short and consistent last April, when he refused to answer more than 200 times during a deposition held in connection with his bankruptcy case in which he’s been accused of fraud by hiding assets. When did you last file a tax return? Did you once live in Panther Creek? Were you separated from your former wife before getting divorced? If I ask you questions about this document, are you going to take the Fifth? Is it your answer that you still plead the Fifth?
“I plead the Fifth,” Parsons answered each time before the deposition ended.
“That was as easy a dep as I’ve had to do in a long time, Jeff,” quipped John Myers, an attorney for local car dealer Todd Green, who once did business with Parsons and is now in the crosshairs of Jeffrey Richardson, bankruptcy trustee who says that Green should be required to surrender money he received from Parsons that rightfully belongs to creditors.
Richardson is questioning deals for a Panther Creek home and a 33-foot boat. Green bought the boat for $115,000 in the spring of 2012, then immediately sold it to Parsons for $150,000 worth of silver, according to court documents. At the time, Parsons had been ordered by a judge in his divorce case not to buy boats, planes, cars, motorcycles or any other mode of transportation without court permission, which Parsons did not have when he made the boat deal with Green.
Parsons in 2011 also gave Green $117,500 in silver upfront for the Panther Creek home, plus $100,000 in cash, then made $9,200 monthly payments to a corporation that had Green as its only member.
Richardson says the deals were fraudulent because THR and Associates, Parsons’ company that was the source of payments to Green, was insolvent when deals were reached for the home and boat, and so the money should be given to creditors. Green, however, says that he acted in good faith. After all, officials with the city and the Greater Springfield Chamber of Commerce had attended a THR press conference in 2010 in which Parsons predicted his company would soon have $1 billion a year in annual revenue, lawyers for all parties say in a statement of the case filed in federal court.
“Todd Green and his LLC had every reason to believe they were dealing with a legitimate businessman; Parsons was treated as such by the entire Springfield business community,” lawyers wrote in the statement of the case in which Richardson seeks funds both from Green and United Community Bank, which received money from Parsons and transferred it to accounts controlled by Green. The bank says that it acted in good faith and had no warning that THR was in financial trouble.
While Parsons last spring refused to answer questions in the case involving Green and United Community Bank, he testified last summer in the case involving former employees who are owed more than $12 million.
Richardson in court documents says that Parsons cannot invoke his Fifth Amendment privilege in the case involving the house and the boat because he has testified previously about the same matters during his bankruptcy case.
Contact Bruce Rushton at [email protected].
