On the homepage
Vikings
Out There
Table Talk
Crimefighting
3rd ex-banker pleads guilty to Ramsey fraud
Print this story
E-mail this story
Save to del.icio.us
Share on Facebook
Share on Digg
Minnesota business by the numbers
See Minnesota's top earning companies, CEOs and non-profits
More from Business
A former executive at Community National Bank pleaded guilty Friday in federal court in St. Paul to one count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud related to financing the failed Ramsey Town Center project in Anoka County.
Curtis A. Martinson, 54, of Eden Prairie, was one of three former executives at the bank, formerly in North Branch, who were originally charged in a 29-count indictment in April. The two other bank executives, former president Bill Sandison of Forest Lake and his son Ross Sandison of Grant, each pleaded guilty in August to one count each of conspiracy.
All three face potential maximum penalties of five years in prison, but sentencing hearings haven't been scheduled.
The men were at the center of an ambitious real estate project to transform the town of Ramsey and surrounding cornfields into a 322-acre suburban community with shops, parks and streets lined with some 2,800 homes. Community National Bank led a $35 million participation loan with more than a dozen other banks to Ramsey Town Center's developer, Bruce Nedegaard. Nedegaard died in 2006. The project never materialized and fell into foreclosure.
According to the original indictment, the men steered some of the loan money to Community National Bank itself, and into their own pockets. They also set up other businesses that made large additional loans for the Ramsey Town Center project, without informing the other banks in the participation loan, and got repaid before other banks.
Community National Bank is under new management and moved to Lino Lakes.
Jennifer Bjorhus • 612-673-4683
Recent Business stories
Blog: Patent Pending
Lights out at U energy conference. Irony police notified.
Just as Lawrence Kazmerski, a top official at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, was about to give the keynote address at the University of Minnesota's annual E3 conference at the RiverCentre in St. Paul, the lights went out, bathing the audience in darkness and a deep sense of irony.