i L i n d . n e t

Of course, I had to thumb through the Honolulu Advertiser’s “best of the best” advertising supplement.

Safeway was the top rated grocery store. By coincidence, the latest issue of Consumer Reports rates supermarkets, and Safeway was #44 on their list.

That is either a comment on our limited range of choices or perhaps the limited opinions offered. Oh, it could mean that Safeway stores are dramatically better here than elsewhere, but that wouldn’t be consistent with our recent visits to Safeway in California.

I guess it’s best to treat the “best of the best” as entertainment, not a real ranking.

As I said yesterday, Peter Boylan deserves credit for following the case of the Royal Hawaiian Treasury Bond scam on Maui by flagging recent court action stemming from the FBI raids in early April.

There’s a lot to be learned from the search warrant, which includes a list of the items they were looking for and an inventory of the items seized.

Among the items to be searched for:

• deeds reflecting the creation of trusts or conveyance of property into trusts.

• notes “purporting to reflect obligations payable to the order of the ‘Henry m. Paulson Jr., dba Secretary of the United States Treasury”.

•Postal Service forms and receipts (can you spell “mail fraud”?)

• Documents describing the Hawaiiloa Foundation’s mortgage assistance program.

• Documents, checks or other items bearing any of a long list of names, most apparently clients of the group.

I sampled a few names and checked the Bureau of Conveyances. Most of those had transferred property into trusts since during 2008-2009, and many were being pursued by creditors.

• Notary records and ledgers.

• Address books or phone lists of customers of the Hawaiiloa Foundation.

• Financial records and cash of the Hawaiiloa Foundation and its officers.

• “Gold or silver coins” from California Numismatic Investments.

• Records of travel, including airline tickets, bills, charge card receipts, hotel/motel/rent-a-car statements, etc.

Items actually seized included a number of thumb drives, computers, hard drives, and DVDs, bank documents, tax documents, deeds, trust documents, client files, and $43,300 in cash. Also seized were several vehicles and additional cash located in bank accounts.

More details regarding the search are described in legal documents that Boylan cited, including the government’s reply to claims that the seized items should be returned, and several additional search warrants (filed as exhibits B, C, D, E, F).

And I was most interested in this document, linking the Mahealani Ventura-Oliver, the woman at the center of the Maui case, with Eric Aaron Lighter, who is currently facing a long list of federal fraud and conspiracy charges in federal court in California.

Lighter has been accused of fraud many times over the past two decades, according to Hawaii court records and documents related to the current charges against him.

I’ve written about the charges against Lighter in California, an earlier Big Island case, and a case of alleged extortion in Honolulu.

Lighter is the brother-in-law of Campbell Estate heiress Muriel Lighter, who is married to Lighter’s brother, Kent.

The U.S. Attorney’s memo argues that the targets of the search warrants will have ample time to contest the evidence gathered after charges are filed.

I think we’ll be hearing a lot more about this whole situation as this case develops.