United States Attorney Erica H. MacDonald today announced the sentencing of PETER EARL DAHL, 54, to a year and a day in prison for wire fraud and filing a false income tax return. DAHL, who pleaded guilty on July 20, 2020, was sentenced on November 16, 2020 before Senior U.S. District Judge Susan Richard Nelson in St. Paul, Minnesota.
According to his guilty plea and documents filed in court, while President and CEO of Minneapolis-based Crown Bank (“Crown”) from 2015 to 2017, DAHL engaged in a scheme to defraud the bank and several individuals. DAHL conducted transactions involving funds and credits of Crown for his own purposes and without permission of the bank’s board or shareholders and without notice to or approval of state and federal regulatory agencies. DAHL used various Crown accounts to cover his personal debts and expenditures and repeatedly kited obligations within accounts of Crown and between accounts at Crown and other banks. In connection with many such transactions, DAHL understood that records would be created at Crown. On many occasions DAHL made and caused to be made false entries in Crown’s records, either because records were created in accounts that did not legitimately belong to DAHL, or because a false entry had to be made in a record to cause funds to be released for the benefit of DAHL.