The person in charge of overseeing and managing Jay Peak and Burke Mountain ski resorts in Vermont, as they work to emerge from a financial scandal, is now playing a leading role in assisting people affected by the Surfside condo complex disaster in Florida.
Michael Goldberg, an attorney with the firm Akerman LLP of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, has been the court-appointed receiver for the two northern Vermont ski areas for the past five years.
He was recently appointed by Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Michael Hanzman in Florida to serve as the receiver for the Champlain Towers South condo association, taking over financial-decision making for the group, the Miami Herald reported.
On June 24, Champlain Towers South, a 12-story beachfront condominium in the Miami suburb of Surfside, partially collapsed, and has since been demolished. So far, 95 bodies have been found, and 14 people are still missing.
“You are the most preeminent and experienced receiver in this community,” the judge told Goldberg during a hearing this month, according to the Florida newspaper.
The Champlain Towers South condo association has been under “intense legal and public scrutiny” for its handling of the deadly building collapse, the Miami Herald reported. The judge immediately gave Goldberg the authority to award up to $10,000 in insurance money from the condo owners to those who need help finding new homes because of the building collapse.
Goldberg was appointed receiver of the Jay Peak assets in April 2016 when federal and state and regulators brought investor fraud claims against Ariel Quiros and his former business partner, Bill Stenger, past CEO and president of Jay Peak.
Goldberg, reached Tuesday, said he didn’t have time to answer questions about his latest appointment as receiver for the condo association in Florida.
Asked how that appointment would affect his work in Vermont, Golderg, in an email, replied, “It will have no impact on Jay Peak — completely unrelated and I am in fact working on Jay Peak today.”
Steve Wright, general manager of Jay Peak Resort, said he had no real concern Jay Peak will get short shrift as a result of Goldberg’s added role.
“He operates at a high level but has an awful lot of capacity available to him, both through his company/corporate network and the boots on the ground here,” Wright wrote in an email.
Michael Pieciak, commissioner of the Vermont Department of Financial Regulation, said Tuesday he’s confident Goldberg will continue to provide high-quality service as the Jay Peak receiver.
“I’ve talked a little bit with Mike and he said that he’s working, obviously, a tremendous amount of hours and that’s a very emotional task as well, the Surfside building collapse and the work that he’s doing,” Pieciak said. “Mike has certainly shown that he can handle a lot of different complicated matters at the same time.”
Stenger and Quiros were accused of misusing $200 million of the more than $400 million they raised from foreign investors over nearly a decade of massive upgrades at Jay Peak, a new hotel and conference center at Burke Mountain, and other projects proposed for Newport.
According to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Quiros siphoned off $50 million from the projects for his personal use through a “Ponzi-like” scheme. Regulators accused Quiros, a Miami businessman, of using the money for his own expenses, including paying taxes and buying a luxury condo in New York City.
The money from the projects headed by Quiros and Stenger came from foreign investors through the federal EB-5 visa program. Each of the more than 800 investors put at least $500,000 into the developments with the hopes of obtaining green cards, or permanent U.S. residency, if their investments met job-creating requirements.
Hundreds of those EB-5 investors, due to the alleged fraud, lost not only their investment money but also any hope of obtaining green cards.
One failed project, a proposed biomedical research facility in Newport, has been termed by regulators “nearly a complete fraud.” That development, known as AnC Bio Vermont, led to criminal charges against Stenger and Quiros and two of their associates.
In his time as receiver, Goldberg has resolved a slew of lawsuits brought by investors and others in connection with the projects headed by Quiros and Stenger, including a $150 million settlement with Raymond James & Associates, a financial services firm used by Quiros.
More recently, Goldberg has been working to keep both Jay Peak and Burke Mountain operating through the business slowdown during the Covid-19 pandemic. That work has included applying for and receiving more than $3 million in federal Paycheck Protection Program funds to help keep the resorts afloat.
He has also been working to sell both the Jay Peak and Burke Mountain ski areas, with plans to use the money to repay investors who were defrauded. However, the pandemic has hindered the sales of those resorts.