A Florida real estate investor was sentenced to three years in federal prison for making false and fraudulent statements on tax returns.
According to court documents, Brian Davison was the co-founder and former CEO of the Tampa-based real estate investment firm Equialt LLC, which was placed into judicial receivership following a US Securities and Exchange Commission complaint in February 2020 in connection with an alleged fraudulent unregistered securities offering that raised more than $170 million from at least 1,100 investors, a number of whom invested their retirement funds.
Between October 2018 and December 2020, Davison filed personal tax returns that underreported his income from Equialt and other business entities by at least $29.7 million. This willful underreporting resulted in a tax loss to the federal government of $6.29 million.
Davison pleaded guilty on March 24. As part of his sentence, the court also ordered Davison to compensate the Internal Revenue Service with the total of his tax fraud.
