Two defendants in shell company stock hijacking case set to plead

Two of the three men criminally charged with a brazen scheme to hijack dormant shell companies and fraudulently pump up their stock shares are now set to plead guilty in the case in October, court records reveal.

One of the defendants, Christopher James Rajkaran of Queens, New York, and Guyana, on Monday had a change of plea hearing scheduled for Oct. 7 in Minnesota federal court, records show.

A judge last week denied Rajkaran’s latest effort to be released from a Minnesota jail on bail, saying he “poses a serious risk of nonappearance” in court. Rajkaran’s lawyer declined to comment Tuesday.

The other defendant, Mark Allen Miller, who is free on a $25,000 unsecured personal recognizance bond, is scheduled to plead guilty on Oct. 14 in the same court, according to a change of plea filing last week.

Miller’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Miller, a general contractor who lives in Breezy Point, Minnesota, and Rajkaran previously pleaded not guilty to 15 counts of securities fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud, and wire fraud.

Their change of plea notices do not say what crimes they will plead guilty to.

The third defendant in the case, Saeid Jaberian, remains on track, for now, to stand trial.

Jaberian, a Minnesota resident who also is known as Andre Jaberian, has pleaded not guilty to the same charges as the other two men and is free on an unsecured $25,000 bond.

The trio was charged in June with a grand jury indictment that accused them of using fake resignation letters purporting to be from other people to seize control of four shell companies — Digitiliti, Encompass Holdings, Bell Buckle Holdings, and Utilicraft Aerospace Industries — from 2017 through 2019.

The indictment says that Miller and Jaberian, as well as an unidentified person related to Miller, actually became the nominal CEOs and presidents of the targeted companies.

The men are accused of then using the Securities and Exchange Commission’s EDGAR public filing system and phony press releases to inflate the share prices of those companies by claiming they had new business opportunities. The companies actually had no significant operations or revenue, the indictment says.

A court filing says the men bought millions of shares of stock in the companies, in many cases for far less than a penny per share, which then were sold on the over-the-counter market for profits of as much as 900%.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota — who declined to comment Tuesday on the scheduled plea hearings for Miller and Rajkaran — previously has said the three men are believed to have made hundreds of thousands of dollars in illicit profits.

Jaberian’s lawyer said in a court filing in late August that “at a future trial, Jaberian’s defense will require asserting that Miller tricked him” into unwittingly participating in a scheme to hijack a dormant shell…