9 May 2011, Silver Spring, Maryland, United States….ANN staff
A South Florida woman was arrested and jailed last month on charges of swindling her fellow Seventh-day Adventist church and community members out of millions of dollars.
Miami-Dade County prosecutors said Marguerite Martial Jean, 38, convinced 300 Haitian Americans in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood to invest at least $3.4 million in a spurious import business from 2007 to 2010, CBS News affiliate WFOR-TV in Miami reported.
Jean told potential investors she owned a lucrative wholesale rice business, said Michael Lamartine Porcena, pastor of Eden Adventist Church in Little Haiti. Porcena, who himself invested “all I had” in her scheme, said Jean used his name to lend credibility to her business.
“She would say, ‘Well, Pastor Porcena is invested in my business.’ Church members thought it must be a good business if I was invested,” Porcena said.
Jean, who previously attended Eden Adventist Church, most recently transferred membership to nearby Shekinah French Adventist Company, an outgrowth of Eden, Porcena said.
“I could never think that someone like her, who taught Sabbath School and was a member of the church board, would do something like that,” he said.
Jean promised her investors up to 22 percent in interest on their investments, Porcena said. Claiming she earned $600 in interest on every $1,800 pallet of rice from India, Jean said she would keep $200 and hand over the remaining $400 to the investor. Instead, Jean lived off investors’ money, he said.
Though rare, the incident is not the first case of affinity fraud to strike the Adventist Church. In 2008, a London court found three Adventists guilty of leading a similar fraudulent investment business.