BOISE, Idaho (AP) — A federal judge on Wednesday blocked the indicted former suitor of Tamarack Resort from overseeing an account that holds retirement money for businesses across the country, concluding there’s a danger he could further diminish assets if he’s left in control.
U.S. District Judge Edward Lodge wrote evidence suggests a “real threat” of loss if Matthew Hutcheson were to remain in charge of the Retirement Security Plan and Trust, a multiple-employer plan that contains retirement savings for about 500 participants.
Some beneficiaries whose money Hutcheson oversaw filed complaints in 2011 with the U.S. Department of Labor, contending he wouldn’t tell them where their money was.
The temporary injunction against Hutcheson as well as a business he’s involved with, Wichita Falls, Texas-based Hutcheson Walker Advisors, was sought by Labor Department Secretary Hilda Solis in May.
Evidence suggests a “real threat of immediate and irreparable injury, loss, or damage will result if the preliminary injunction is not issued,” Lodge wrote in his order Wednesday.
“Though a great deal of funds have already been transferred from the particular funds at issue, there is a danger that the remaining … assets could be further diminished by these defendants,” the order said.
Hutcheson faces 31 federal criminal charges following a grand jury indictment in April.
This effort to remove him from overseeing the plan is part of a separate Labor Department lawsuit filed last month seeking to recover retirees’ money and bar Hutcheson from working as a fiduciary again.
In 2010, he made a failed $40 million offer for Tamarack in 2010 in a bid to take over the beleaguered Idaho vacation getaway. He has been accused of pulling millions from retirement savings plans, then using that cash for personal gain and for initial payments toward the failed golf and ski resort.
Hutcheson’s attorney, Dennis Charney, didn’t return a phone call seeking comment.
Hutcheson is out of jail and under his father-in-law’s supervision while awaiting trial later this year on the federal charges.
Jeanne B. Bryant of Receivership Management Inc. in Brentwood, Tenn., has been appointed independent fiduciary of the plans Hutcheson had been overseeing. A representative of Receivership Management didn’t immediately return a call seeking comment Wednesday on plans for the Retirement Security Plan and Trust.
Investigators with the U.S. Department of Labor contend, among other things, that Hutcheson transferred $3.28 million from the fund to buy a bank note secured by the Osprey Meadows golf course at Tamarack, about 90 miles north of Boise.
Federal investigators say Hutcheson later pledged the note as collateral to a lender in Virginia for a loan to pay his legal bills, but he defaulted on the loan and may have lost title to the note.
Department of Labor attorneys contend he set the complicated transaction in motion not for the benefit of retirees whose interests he was obligated to protect, but to help himself in his bid to take control of Tamarack assets.
“Hutcheson did not engage in any of these activities for the benefit of participants and beneficiaries of the plans that actually owned the funds that were intended to provide retirement security,” wrote the federal agency’s lawyer, M. Patricia Smith, in documents filed last month with the judge. “Hutcheson took this money for his personal benefit.”
