Ex-bank chairman gets 62 months for $23.6 million fraud

The former board chairman and co-owner of Nodus International Bank, a Puerto Rican international banking entity, was sentenced to 62 months in federal prison for a wire fraud conspiracy that cost the bank more than $23.6 million, the Justice Department announced.

Juan Francisco Ramirez, 60, of Miami, also received three years of supervised release and was ordered to forfeit about $13.6 million, which the department said represents the proceeds he derived from the scheme. Ramirez pleaded guilty in September 2025 to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, according to the department.

“This defendant abused the trust of his bank’s depositors, and when the bank went under, innocent people lost their savings,” said Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.

According to court documents, Ramirez and a co-conspirator hid from other board members, executives and the bank’s regulator, the Office of the Commissioner of Financial Institutions of Puerto Rico (OCIF), that certain investments and loans benefited the two of them. The department said that violated Puerto Rican law and bank policy on insider transactions.

From 2017 to 2023, Ramirez conspired with others to invest more than $11 million of the bank’s funds in a Miami-based lender so it could loan the money to him and a co-conspirator, according to court documents. The department said the conspirators knew the transactions were illegal and concealed their prohibited nature through sham investments in the lender.

Between January 2018 and September 2021, Ramirez and the co-conspirator fraudulently induced the bank’s board and comptroller to approve or facilitate the purchase of at least 47 promissory notes totaling about $25.3 million, according to court documents. The notes came from a Miami finance company the two jointly owned. They were presented as funding loans to legitimate individuals or businesses, but the department said the money went to personal investments, mortgage payments and credit card expenses.

OCIF notified the bank in early March 2023 that it intended to place it into liquidation, and the bank agreed to a voluntary liquidation later that month. On April 28, 2023, without OCIF authorization, Ramirez and a co-conspirator caused the bank to buy a loan portfolio of about $26 million from their finance company, according to court documents. Most of the loans were delinquent, nonperforming and uncollateralized. The bank accepted the portfolio as payment of the finance company’s debt on the earlier promissory notes, relieving the company of its debt to the bank and benefiting Ramirez and his co-conspirator, the department said.

“Ramirez was entrusted to lead a bank. Instead, he looted it,” said U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones for the Southern District of Florida.

Acting Special Agent in Charge Charles Miller of the IRS Criminal Investigation Florida Field Office said, “Financial frauds can be complicated, but the law is simple: do your business honestly and protect your depositors, or you will be brought to justice.”