Category
Financial fraud
Misappropriation, fraud, embezzlement, prosperity-gospel scandals.
Filed
5 entriesThe Grassley Senate Finance Committee Televangelist Investigation
A four-year inquiry by the United States Senate Finance Committee under Senator Charles Grassley examined the finances of six major American televangelism ministries, concluding that the federal tax-exemption framework as applied to large religious broadcasters was insufficient to ensure ordinary nonprofit accountability.
FILED · 1997–2023 · LDS · FINANCIALEnsign Peak Advisors — SEC Sanction of the LDS Investment Arm
In February 2023, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission settled administrative proceedings against Ensign Peak Advisors and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints over a 22-year scheme using thirteen shell LLCs to obscure the Church's investment portfolio, which had grown to approximately $32 billion by 2018.
FILED · 1988 · PENTECOSTAL · FINANCIALThe Jimmy Swaggart Scandals
The Pentecostal televangelist Jimmy Swaggart was defrocked by the Assemblies of God in 1988 after the public disclosure of his use of prostitutes; subsequent IRS proceedings and a second 1991 disclosure further established the institutional record of one of the highest-revenue televangelism operations of the 1980s.
FILED · 1987 · PENTECOSTAL · FINANCIALPTL Ministries and the Jim Bakker Fraud
The collapse of the PTL televangelism empire after the disclosure of a payoff to Jessica Hahn led to a federal fraud prosecution of Jim Bakker for the oversale of lifetime-partnership memberships in PTL's Heritage USA resort.
FILED · 1971–1982 · CATHOLIC · FINANCIALBanco Ambrosiano, Roberto Calvi, and the Vatican Bank
The 1982 collapse of Banco Ambrosiano, then Italy's largest private bank, exposed a network of Vatican-Bank-controlled offshore shell companies that had concealed approximately $1.3 billion in missing assets; the bank's chairman Roberto Calvi was found hanged under Blackfriars Bridge in London weeks before the collapse.
