Golden Beach vending-machine mogul sentenced to 2-1/2 years for tax evasion

A wealthy Golden Beach woman who owns the Gilly vending machine business was sentenced on Friday to 2-1/2 years in prison after agreeing to pay $1.9 million in back taxes to the federal government for failing to report a vast sum of income hidden for years in foreign bank accounts.

Gilda B. Rosenberg, 60, was ordered to surrender to prison authorities in late October by U.S. District Judge Beth Bloom, who gave the woman a lower sentence than prosecutors sought for her tax-evasion conviction in Miami federal court. Bloom also imposed a $30,000 fine.

Under her plea agreement, Rosenberg must also pay a penalty of $5.85 million to the Internal Revenue Service to resolve her civil liability for not filing reports on her foreign bank accounts with the Department of Treasury.

In March, Rosenberg pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the IRS by concealing undeclared foreign accounts, filing false tax returns and evading taxes over a decade.

Rosenberg, whose family owns Miami-based Gilly Vending Inc., also pleaded guilty last year to a separate conspiracy charge involving a scheme to defraud the Army and Air Force Exchange Service in Texas by filing false reports on vending machine sales of snacks and beverages to avoid fully paying commissions. She still faces sentencing in the Texas case on Wednesday, but it would run concurrently with the prison term imposed by Bloom, court records show.

Rosenberg, a dual U.S. and Colombian citizen, admitted in the tax-evasion case in Miami that she conspired with two family members to hide more than $90 million in assets and income held in undeclared bank accounts in Andorra, Israel, Panama and Switzerland between 2010 and 2022, according to a factual statement filed with her plea agreement with the Justice Department.

Hiding assets abroad

Rosenberg and the other relatives knew they had not disclosed their ownership of these foreign financial accounts to the U.S. government and not paid any taxes on the income earned from these assets, as was required by law, the statement says.

The family members consolidated their assets at accounts with Credit Suisse AG in Switzerland and the United Kingdom, and then they told Credit Suisse employees that they were seeking to hide their assets from U.S. authorities, according to the statement. Their assets remained at Credit Suisse until 2013, when the bank closed their accounts because they were U.S. citizens.

“Some of the banks, including Credit Suisse AG, knew that the Defendant and her family members were U.S. persons,” Justice Department lawyers Mark Daly, Marissa Brodney and Ana Maria Martinez wrote in a sentencing memo.

“At the time that the family members divided the family’s assets in 2017, and in the years following, the family members used, or attempted to use, various schemes and machinations both to covertly transfer assets to [Rosenberg] in the United States and to conceal their ongoing tax evasion and history thereof,” the prosecutors wrote, seeking a three-year, four-month prison sentence.

Rosenberg’s sentencing memo, filed by defense attorneys Bruce Zimet and Joan Silverstein, was sealed by Judge Bloom at their request.

But in her federal case in Texas, the defense lawyers focused on Rosenberg’s philanthropy, including leading a service project at the Miami Rescue Mission and donating to God’s Kids Learning Center in Miami.

“Given Rosenberg’s history of caring and giving to others, her appearance in a federal court for sentencing is not easy to reconcile,” they wrote in a memo filed in federal court in Sherman, Texas. “She is determined to not let her failings define who she is as a person, and obstruct her ability to make a difference in the life of others.”

Moving assets between banks

In the Miami tax-evasion case, court records show that Rosenberg and her relatives moved their assets from Credit Suisse to new accounts at Bank Leumi in Israel, Union Bancaire Privée and PKB Privat Bank SA in Switzerland, and an Andorran bank. Rosenberg was listed as the beneficial owner of accounts at UBP and the Andorran bank, claiming she was a Colombian and not a U.S. citizen.

Rosenberg, along with her relatives, did not file Reports of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts (FBARS) disclosing their offshore financial accounts, as required by law. In addition, they continued to file false tax returns with the Internal Revenue Service that omitted income generated by their offshore assets.

In 2017, Rosenberg and her relatives divided the family’s assets and signed documents to make it appear that she and a relative gifted the offshore assets to another relative who had renounced his U.S. citizenship. Rosenberg and her relatives then tried to transfer assets to her in the United States, prosecutors said.

Rosenberg filed false tax returns from 2009 to 2017 that did not report more than $5.5 million in income she earned from her assets at Union Bancaire Privée, which caused a tax loss to the IRS of $1,927,342, according to prosecutors.