Two men ordered to pay $1.48 million for Ponzi scheme involving Florida trucking company

Two Florida men were ordered to pay the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) more than a million dollars in connection with a Ponzi scheme involving a Coral Springs trucking company.

On January 15, 2026, a Florida judge ordered Ricardi Celicourt and Brisly Guillaume to pay more than $1.48 million for their participation in an investment fraud scheme involving trucking company Royal Bengal Logistics Inc. (RBL) which “fraudulently raised approximately $112 million from 1,500 investors and targeted Haitian-Americans,” according the SEC.

Celicourt was ordered to pay the SEC $586,492.16.

Guillaume was ordered to pay the SEC $895,667.15.

On July 18, 2024, the two men were charged by the SEC with violations of the securities registration and broker-dealer registration provisions of the federal securities law.

Authorities alleged that “from 2021 through 2023, defendants raised at least $109 million through Royal Bengal’s unregistered offering and received combined compensation of $1.3 million in purported bonuses tied to their efforts. As alleged, during this time period, the defendants were not registered with the Commission as brokers or dealers and Royal Bengal’s securities were not registered with the Commission, and there was no valid exemption from registration.”

The SEC also took action against Sanjay Singh, the former president of RBL, for running a Ponzi scheme through his trucking company.

In 2025, Singh was sentenced to 23 years in a federal prison after he was convicted by a jury on all eight counts of an indictment that alleged that he violated federal laws criminalizing conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, and engaging in transactions in unlawful proceeds.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida described the scheme:

“The conspiracy began in January 2020 and was ongoing at the time of his arrest. Singh and his co-conspirators held RBL out to potential investors as a thriving and successful trucking business, all while RBL’s actual trucking business lost money. In the process, Singh and his co-conspirators made material misrepresentations and material omissions about the riskiness of investing in RBL, the profitability of RBL’s trucking operations, how RBL would pay its investors, and how RBL would use investor funds. Through these material misrepresentations and omissions, Singh and his co-conspirators raised over $158 million from investors, which Singh and his co-conspirators then used in part to pay existing investors promised returns.“