Former Anaheim Chamber CEO pleads guilty to fraud, financial charges – Orange County Register

Todd Ament, the former Anaheim Chamber of Commerce CEO, pleaded guilty Friday, July 1, to multiple counts of fraud and financial charges for what federal investigators described as a series of crimes including fraudulently obtaining coronavirus relief money, defrauding a cannabis company, lying on his taxes and making false claims to a bank to obtain a mortgage.

Ament, who was arrested in May and last month agreed to a deal to plead guilty to four federal charges, is expected to be sentenced by a judge later this year. He faces a punishment of up to 20 years in prison for two of the counts, and 30 years for another, the Department of Justice said in a news release Friday. The fourth, related to submitting false tax returns, could carry a three-year sentence.

The two counts of wire fraud are related to investigations from 2019 and 2020. Investigators said Ament, 57, in 2019 schemed to defraud a cannabis company with the help of a political consultant by soliciting the company to pay $225,000 to the chamber “with the understanding that it would have access” to a task force crafting legislation in Anaheim beneficial to the cannabis market, the news release said. But $41,000 of that money went directly to Ament without the company’s knowledge, investigators said.

The next year, Ament applied for and was granted pandemic relief money through his business, TA Consulting LLC, and used the $61,900 on clothes, at boat dealers and toward his personal property taxes, federal investigators said.

Later in 2020, while working to obtain a loan for a second home in Big Bear, Ament falsely reported to a bank that $205,000 in deposits to his account from a public relations firm were earned income, when he “knew” the funds were personal loans aimed at making it seem he had more assets, the release said.

And over three years, from 2017 to 2019, Ament lied on his tax returns, investigators said, failing to report some income and resulting in “a tax loss to the United States government of $249,998 for those three tax years,” according to the news release.

It was through court filings related to the investigation into Ament that allegations of an influential group of business and political officials led in part by the former chamber CEO were made public. The self-described “cabal” may have held sway over Anaheim politics, investigators said in an affidavit.