Michigan family office employee charged with money laundering and fraud
A longtime employee of Michigan family office EDP Management Company has agreed to plead guilty to swindling its matriarch out of $16 million through money laundering and wire fraud.
Robert Allen Haveman was charged with two felonies at the US District Court in Grand Rapids and faces a 20-year sentence on the fraud charge and 10 years for the money laundering charge.
Haveman, who had worked for EDP since 1999, has signed a plea agreement to plead guilty to the charges.
He is charged with transferring money intended for billionaire matriarch Elsa Prince-Broekhuizen and her family trust to his own accounts, creating fake entries in company records to disguise his theft.
His money laundering charge is connected to the purchase of land on Lake Michigan.
Prince-Broekhuizen's late-husband, Edgar Prince, founded Prince Corporation, a leading manufacturer of die cast machinery and auto parts. His company was sold in 1996, one year after his death, for $1.35 billion. She has since married Ren Broekhuizen.
Through the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation the family supports causes of the religious right, and Prince-Broekhuizen was the biggest individual donor in support of Proposition 8, which sought to ban gay marriage in California.
Haveman was president of the investment entity with responsibility for private equity deals. He had joined the family office after a decade-long period of service at the family business, Prince Corporation, where he had been secretary and treasurer.
According to his Bloomberg profile, he has served as a director at Alterra Healthcare since 1995, and is also a member of the advisory council at Wedgwood Christian Services.
Prince-Broekhuizen is the mother of four children. Her son, Erik Prince, founded government services and security company Blackwater USA, which supplied mercenary forces to the US government and is controversially connected to the Nisour Square massacre, where 17 Iraqi civilians were killed. Her daughter, Betsy, married into the second generation of the DeVos family, which founded cosmetics and home products company Amway.
