Harbor City called George Santos a ‘perfect fit.’ The SEC called the company a fraud
In July 2020, a small Florida-based investment firm announced that a man named George Devolder had been hired as its New York regional director. “When we had the opportunity to welcome him to our team, I was delighted,” the company’s founder and chief executive said in a news release. “He’s a perfect fit.”
Devolder is now better known as George Santos, the 34-year-old freshman Republican congressman from New York’s 3rd Congressional District who brazenly lied to voters about key details of his biography. And the company for which he was “a perfect fit,” Harbor City Capital, is no longer in operation. Its assets were frozen in 2021, when the Securities and Exchange Commission accused it of running a “classic Ponzi scheme” that had defrauded investors of millions of dollars.
The SEC complaint did not name Santos, who has denied knowledge of the alleged wrongdoing.
Court records, company documents and previously unreported footage of workplace Zoom meetings obtained by The Washington Post, as well as interviews with former Harbor City employees and investors, reveal how the firm nurtured Santos’s ambitions and acquainted him with business associates who have gone on to play notable roles in his scandal-plagued political career. When the company was shuttered in 2021, after allegedly collecting a total of $17.1 million from more than 100 individuals, Santos joined Harbor City executives in creating other businesses and political consultancies now under scrutiny after his election to Congress, according to business registration documents. [Continue reading…]