CHARLESTON, W.Va. — The former operator of Fairmont’s Middletown Mall has pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges.
Dietrich Fansler was managing member of Pin Oak Properties, a Morgantown real estate development business that operated Middletown Mall.
He pleaded guilty Monday to two charges in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of West Virginia.
The first was a count of fraudulent concealment of bankruptcy estate assets.
Pin Oak Properties filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy relief on June 7, 2017.
While bankruptcy was ongoing, Fansler was supposed to collect rent from tenants of Middletown Mall and to ensure deposit of the rent into a debtor-in-possession bank account for Pin Oak Properties.
Instead, according to the charge against him, Fansler had the money deposited into an unrelated but similar-sounding entity called Pin Oak LLC.
Over time, that amounted to $225,000.
He used the money to pay other expenses that were not related to Pin Oak Properties, according to the charges. But Fansler falsely declared six monthly operating reports to bankruptcy court, according to the charges.
Fansler also was accused of withholding federal income taxes and Federal Insurance Contributions Act taxes over several years without passing on the money to the Internal Revenue Service, according to the charges.
That included $127,073 collected but not passed on from Pin Oak plus $145,350 from another company, Villa Rentals, a residential building construction company in Morgantown.
Fansler was also accused of not paying his personal income tax in 2009, 2010, 2012 and 2013, amounting to $608,022.
A summary of the guilty plea filed in federal court states that the maximum penalty for the first count is five years in prison, a fine up to $250,000 and supervised release of no more than three years.
The second count could result in the same penalties.
Middletown Mall — and Fansler’s role in it — made news last year when the state Auditor revealed the state paid almost a million dollars for rental property not actually being used.
The Auditor’s Office revealed state government was paying a combined total of $30,907.34 a month for use of multiple office suites at the mall that it had actually vacated.
Dietrich Fansler Information (Text)