A new wrinkle in the case of a Sonoma County real estate tycoon accused of bilking nearly 200 investors out of $46 million, as it turns out most of his properties were financed by a single lender, raising questions about what they knew.
One of the bigger scandals currently developing up in wine country is the case of Sonoma County developer Kenneth Mattson, who was arrested by the feds in May and charged with a sweeping range of fraudulent real estate deals. Mattson had purchased nearly 90 properties across wine country, but his federal indictment called his real estate empire a “a classic Ponzi scheme,” wherein Mattson allegedly “offered and sold fake ownership interests” in properties to people who never actually received the ownership interests they paid for. Interestingly, most of Mattson’s investors were older retired people he recruited at church groups, and for good measure, Mattson and his wife were well-known anti-LGBTQ crusaders.
The Santa Rosa Press Democrat has been doing some serious digging through bankruptcy and property records, now that Mattson is being forced to sell his properties at fire-sale prices. They discovered that one property was purchased in partnership with an investment company amusingly named Tony’s Salami & Cheese Fund I. Perhaps less amusingly, that company just happens to share the exact same Sacramento address as a lender known as Socotra Capital. And as the Press Democrat reports, this is raising questions about the degree to which Socotra Capital was aware of Mattson’s alleged Ponzi scheming…