It is the greatest fraud in Vermont’s history.

The EB-5 scandal has the elements of a true crime novel: A shady grifter. Secret meetings. Duped investors. Complicit regulators. A panicked whistleblower. A tenacious journalist. Whispers of blackmail. Millions of dollars lost. A dramatic raid by Federal agents that brings it all crashing down.

In 2012, when VTDigger founder and editor Anne Galloway attended a glitzy press conference announcing plans for massive investments and thousands of jobs in the financially depressed Northeast Kingdom, she smelled a rat. The latest revelations in the unfolding saga include a state attorney who alleged that top government officials knowingly “aided and abetted” the fraud.

In this Vermont Conversation, Galloway offers a primer on the EB-5 scandal, starting from the program’s beginnings in 2006 to the most recent developments. In 2017, Galloway was a finalist for the Ancil Payne Award for Ethics, the Al Neuharth Innovation in Investigative Journalism Award and the Investigative Reporters and Editors FOIA Award for her EB-5 investigation.

Galloway says that the EB-5 scandal is a cautionary tale in the small Green Mountain state. “We have a situation in Vermont in which we’re not very good about holding people accountable,” she says. “There are companies and entities that operate in this state with impunity because people in power aren’t willing to be subjected to the kind of scrutiny that would make their work more accountable to the public.”