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Al Parish’s spouse, children offered immunity deal
By Dan McCue
Staff Writer
Yolanda Yoder, wife and investment business partner of disgraced economist Al Parish, will give up all she has of value—including the jewelry she wore on her wedding day—under a proposed agreement that would shield her and her children from litigation related to her husband’s misuse of more than $50 million in investors’ funds, in exchange for a $10 fee.
Parish pleaded guilty on Oct. 5 to three federal charges of securities fraud related to an investment offering that over some 10 years raised $112.5 million from 600 to 650 investors, including his former employer, Charleston Southern University. A hearing on the proposed agreement is slated for 1:30 p.m. Dec. 18 in Charleston federal court.
Yoder has never been charged with any criminal wrongdoing in connection with her husband’s operation of several investment funds, but has been named as a defendant in at least six civil lawsuits filed in the S.C. Court of Common Pleas since her husband’s malfeasance became known last spring. The settlement deal offered to Yoder would release her from a separate civil proceeding filed last April by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
U.S. District Judge David C. Norton stayed those cases so that a court-appointed receiver would be unencumbered in his effort to secure the vast array of assets Parish bought with investors’ funds, including hundreds of gnomes, clown paintings by comedian Red Skelton, pens, jewelry and scores of pieces of cartoon art.
J. David Dantzler Jr., lead attorney for court-appointed receiver S. Gregory Hays, said under the settlement deal, Yoder “gives us everything of value, and she walks away from everything.”
She will be allowed to hold onto some personal items, but those, Dantzler said, “are only those things that would return no value to investors if they were sold.”
Dantzler said the $10 fee is required for the agreement to be enforceable.
The discussions that led to the settlement proposal started a few hours after the receivership was established on April 5, he said.
“We have been in conversations with her about the assets related to the case from the first day, because the reality is, she was a joint owner of a lot of these things—real estate in particular,” Dantzler said.
“Parish also listed her as an officer of Parish Economics LLC, and another LLC through which she invested in number of business ventures,” he said.
But it quickly became apparent to the receiver and his investigators that Yoder was as much in the dark about many of her husband’s activities as his investors.
“We turned up absolutely no evidence of her active involvement in the investment scheme or actual knowledge that it was fraud,” Dantzler said.
As an example, he pointed to Yoder’s explanation of Parish’s extensive private jet travel. Like others, Yoder said her husband told her the flights were “cardmember benefits” he’d earned from American Express as a result of the millions of dollars of activity on his card stemming from his management of investments.
“In addition to our own investigation, she also twice submitted to polygraph tests administered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which corroborate our finding.”
But if Yoder was as duped as anyone, haggling over what she might keep and what had to be sold to reimburse investors was an emotional process, Dantzler said.
“A lot of the assets that were recovered were things that from her perspective were just family property,” he said.
“Mrs. Parish was cooperative from day one, but I think she had difficulty coming to grips with what was occurring. I think she was blindsided as many investors were. That said, I’ll also say that she never insisted on trying to hold on to a lot of assets.“
Dan McCue is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at dmccue@setcommedia.com.
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