MIAMI – A Colombian-American entrepreneur behind a Miami-Dade County-based vending machine company that had been sued by Alonzo Mourning admitted to defrauding the federal government as part of two plea deals in Florida and Texas, records show.
Gilda Rosenberg, who was born in Cali and lives in Miami-Dade, pleaded guilty to federal charges on Monday related to a tax evasion conspiracy. Federal investigators estimated she and her family hid about $90 million in Andorra, Israel, Panama, and Switzerland, prosecutors said.
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Court records show Rosenberg, 60, is a former client of Credit Suisse Group AG, now UBS Group AG, a bank involved in a 2014 plea deal that included paying $2.6 billion after admitting to helping U.S. taxpayers to hide money from the Internal Revenue Service.
Federal prosecutors in Miami alleged that members of Rosenberg’s family had maintained offshore accounts since the 1970s before she and two relatives engaged in U.S. tax evasion.
Rosenberg earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from Wellesley College and the University of Miami. In 1983, she founded Gilly Vending, a Florida company with a warehouse in Miami Gardens.
According to prosecutors, she became an authorized signer on some of her family’s accounts by the late 1990s before they “consolidated their assets” using Credit Suisse accounts in Switzerland and the United Kingdom in the early 2000s.
According to prosecutors, Credit Suisse closed the accounts in 2013 and the family moved assets to new accounts at Bank Leumi in Israel, Union Bancaire Privée (UBP), PKB Privat Bank SA in Switzerland, and an Andorran bank.
Federal investigators reported Rosenberg was the owner of accounts at UBP and the Andorran bank and in the opening documents she claimed she was a Colombian resident and not a U.S. citizen. Records show the registered Republican lives in Golden Beach and owns an apartment in Aventura.
Prosecutors claimed that “in or about” 2017, Rosenberg and her family divided the assets by making it “appear” that she and another relative “gifted” the assets to another relative who had renounced his U.S. citizenship and also “created fake loan and investment” records.
In 2019, Gilly Vending made headlines after a civil court judge ordered Rosenberg’s company to pay Mourning about $590,000 after the NBA star filed a lawsuit over a dispute about not getting paid for a 2015 deal that made him the face of the company’s healthy vending program.
After federal prosecutors filed a case against her last year in Texas, Rosenberg admitted as part of a plea deal that she had conspired to defraud the Army and Air Force Exchange Service, the government agency that has vending machines at the U.S. Army, Air Force, and Space Force installations worldwide.
Investigators accused Rosenberg of “making and presenting false reports ... to avoid fully paying contractually required commissions.”
Meanwhile in Miami federal court, as part of another plea deal, prosecutors reported Rosenberg admitted to filing tax returns from 2010 to 2017 that excluded the more than $5.5 million in income that she had earned from her assets at UBP, which caused a $1.9 million tax loss for the IRS.
Prosecutors said the IRS Criminal Investigation’s International Tax & Financial Crimes Unit was still investigating the case and Rosenberg’s sentencing in the Miami case is on May 30.