Louisiana pastor confesses to stealing $900,000 from church and congregants
(The AEGIS Alliance) – A Louisiana Baptist pastor who’s well known has confessed to stealing almost $900,000 coming from his church, associated rental residential or commercial properties, his congregants, and also a charter school.
Charles Southall III who preached to the First Emanuel Baptist Church located in New Orleans as well as Baton Rouge for over 30 years, gave a guilty plea on Tuesday to money laundering charges, NOLA.com reported.
Court records indicate that Southall embezzled contributions that came from congregants that were supposed to finance church philanthropic ventures and property renovations.
He additionally stole grants and loan money granted to the Edgar P Harney Spirit of Excellence Academy that he had started. He laundered the money to a banking account managed by himself as well as an accomplice whose identity was actually concealed from court records.
Southall additionally stole rental and purchase payments stemming from properties his church was the owner of.
Prosecutors stated Southall would utilize the cash to repay his credit card expenses and also to pay for various other personal expenditures.
As a component of a plea deal with New Orleans federal prosecutors, the age 64 preacher agreed to pay back $687,000 to First Emanuel, $85,000 to Spirit of Excellence as well as $110,000 to individuals that were taken advantage of.
He could possibly get as much as one decade behind bars at a sentencing hearing scheduled to happen on January 17, but defendants that gave guilty pleas without attending the trial seldom get the toughest penalty available.
Prior to his being prosecuted, Southall took pleasure in close associations with several New Orleans’ political and business elite. Included was businessman Ashton Ryan that is dealing with a plethora of federal government fraud charges deriving from the 2017 failure of his New Orleans-located First NBC Bank, the regional Times-Picayune paper NOLA.com mentioned.
Kyle James Lee – The AEGIS Alliance – This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
