When I wrote the first post in what would be my extensive and exclusive series of reports revealing Steven Ingersoll's systematic and cynical financial plunder of the Grand Traverse Academy, I wish I'd known about the Academy board's May 20, 2013 meeting with attorney Meg Hackett.
If I had, I would have used this “L word” in the headline: liar.
Mentley made her statement knowing that, nearly a year before, she'd sat in a meeting with her boss Steven Ingersoll, Mark Noss, CPA Tony Henning and others listening to Ingersoll plead that he needed to have his $3.5 million dollar Academy debt characterized as a loan since he “could not afford to pay that (his debt) and his taxes all at the same time.”
In her testimony this week during Ingersoll's federal fraud trial, Hackett stated that Mark Noss had asked for the meeting (which lasted about two hours) on behalf of Steven Ingersoll since Ingersoll indicated that he “wanted to explain his view of his indebtedness” to the Grand Traverse Academy. Hackett testified under cross examination by criminal defense attorney Martin E. Crandall that she met with Noss and Mentley separately for approximately an hour after Ingersoll left.
It will take a federal investigation to determine the extent of Ingersoll's financial carnage and whether the Academy board was merely compliant...or complicit.
I'm betting Steven Ingersoll's verdict won't be the last we hear of the Grand Traverse Academy.
But, unlike Ingersoll and his various enablers and accomplices, Miss Fortune won't be using taxpayer money to make that bet.