Future convicted felon Johnson loves to take to social media and accuse the GGC Recovery team of “causing damages” and “looting” the Lepe farm. Sometimes we supposedly stole and/or damaged $1 million worth of we don’t know what, sometimes it’s $500,000. He has made videos with similar accusation that you can view at his GGC website.
His videos are a real hoot. In one, the most he can do is claim that there are damages [sic] to a rubber tree. We pruned it–oh, the horror! In another, he and Ramirez wander around the hacienda front yard talking about missing peacocks. In a third, he shows shots of the drained pool at GGC.
These trivial accusation–we hesitate to elevate them by calling them accusations, let’s just say trivialities–are all false and pale in comparison to the $10.45 million he has misappropriated or outright stolen from us investors.
The only charge to which we care to respond is that we stole property from the farm. In fact, we did no such thing. During our six months managing Lepe, registered legal documents showed that Mario Del Real was the chairman of the board and controlled the ownership of Inmobiliaria Galt’s Gulch, the real estate holding company, and that his daughter was the general manager. These are facts that Johnson has admitted.
In late October 2014, we asked Del Real’s permission to run the farm and he granted it. We then paid the back wages and payroll benefits of the farm workers that Johnson wouldn’t pay, and continued operations.
In the links below, we provide the spread sheets that the farm managers created and used to detail all the money earned and spent from November 2014 to April 20 2015. You will see that, not surprisingly, the majority of the expenses were for wages.
Income and expenses Nov 2014
Income and expenses Dec 2014
Income and expenses Jan 2015
Income and expenses Feb 2015
Income and expenses Mar 2015
Income and expenses Apr 2015
The Lepe farm is not profitable. The previous owner, Ramirez, neglected it for years. The trees are stressed from lack of water and from mineral deficiencies. The orchards produce only about one tenth of what a healthy commercial orchard would. In addition to the problem of poor yields and therefore pitiful income, we had ongoing expenses for repairs to the irrigation system that is aging and needs to be replaced, and for the replacement of a transformer that was stolen for the second time just before we took over operations. This transformer powered the pump for the main well.
It took approximately $23,000 per month to pay the employees and keep the lights on. This did not include the salary of our supervisor, Ken Carpenter.
Because the farm is unprofitable and the harvest for the period in question was slow in coming, we were forced to sell chattels from around the premise to pay salaries. These sales are in the above reports and total CLP $20.349.560 or approximately $34,000.
So, the Pinocchio of GGC was, as usual, off by more than an order of magnitude in his lie about how much money was raised by our selling the junk lying around the farm.
If you wanted to give future convicted Johnson the benefit of the doubt, you may have thought that he was in good faith trying to make estimates of these sales. You would, of course, be wrong. Since he took back the farm, he’s had access to all the farm records. Not only does he have these very spread sheets that you see linked on this page, he has all the original receipts, as well.
We really don’t care about Johnson’s lying posts on Facebook. We wonder why he does? We are sure the prosecutors and judges in his criminal trials won’t be swayed by this type of nonsense.