Amit Patel to Serve 78 Months in U.S. Prison for $22 million Embezzlement

Amit Patel defrauded the Jacksonville Jaguars football team owned by Pakistani American billionaire Shahid Khan

April 26, 2024

Last month, a United States judge sentenced Amit Patel to serve 78 months in prison. Patel, 31-years-old, was charged with wire fraud and engaging in an illegal monetary transaction for embezzling more than $22 million from the Jacksonville Jaguars.

“Amit Patel knowingly and wittingly created a deceptive scheme to fund a lavish lifestyle at his employer’s expense, and (his) sentencing is a warning to other scam artists,” Mark Dargis, Acting Special Agent in Charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigations, Jacksonville, said in a statement.

The embezzlement took place between September 2019 and February 2023, when Patel was a finance manager with the Jaguars, a National Football League (NFL) team based in Jacksonville, Florida. Patel, who started working for the Jaguars in April 2018, helped prepare Jaguar’s monthly financial statements, oversaw department budgets, and was the administrator of various programs. The programs included a virtual credit card (VCC) system which the Jaguars adopted in April 2019 and for which he was the sole administrator starting in October 2019.

As the sole administrator, Patel used his authority to charge $22.2 million in fraudulent transactions, until he was fired in February 2023. He made hundreds of purchases and transactions with no legitimate business purpose. They include: placing bets with online gambling websites; purchasing a condominium in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida; paying for personal travel for himself and friends, including chartering private jets and booking luxury hotels and private rental residences; acquiring a new Tesla Model 3 sedan and Nissan pickup truck; and purchasing cryptocurrency, non-fungible tokens, electronics, sports memorabilia, a country club membership, spa treatments, concert and sporting event tickets, home furnishings, and luxury wrist watches.

To hide his fraudulent transactions, Patel identified legitimate reoccurring VCC transactions, such as catering, airfare, and hotel charges, and then duplicated those transactions. He also inflated the amounts of legitimate VCC transactions.

Patel did not report any of his illicit income on his tax returns and so was also investigated by the Internal Revenue Service. In December 2023, he pled guilty to two charges, of wire fraud and illegal monetary transaction.

The Jacksonville Jaguars team is owned by Shahid (Shad) Khan. He also owns the Fulham F.C. soccer team in the English Premier League and All Elite Wrestling.  

Khan is the owner of Flex-N-Gate (FNG), a Jacksonville based provider of metal and plastic automobile parts. With $6.8 billion in annual revenues, it employs more than 25,000 people at manufacturing and engineering facilities in the U.S., Canada, China, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Germany, France, and Spain. 

Khan, an immigrant from Pakistan, began working at FNG while pursuing his engineering degree at the University of Illinois. During his years at FNG, Khan held a variety of positions, rising to the position of an Engineering Manager.

In 1978, leaving FNG, Khan used his personal savings and a $50,000 loan from the Small Business Loan Corporation to start Bumper Works, which designed a one-piece bumper for trucks. Two years later, the success of Bumper Works provided Khan with the capital to purchase FNG.  

Khan, who became a U.S. citizen in 2018, has a net worth of $12 billion, according to Forbes. Since 2012, he and his wife Ann have donated more than $20 million to youth fitness, military and veterans, women's health issues, Covid-19 and other charity programs in the Jacksonville area.

Khan’s son Tony is the Jaguars' senior vice president for football administration and technology.

In 2018, Khan was appointed chairman of NFL’s Legalized Sports Betting Committee.

A week before his plea agreement, Patel’s lawyer issued a statement saying, “Patel used VCC funds to gamble on Daily Fantasy Sports, the vast majority of which was done on FanDuel, and a significant portion on DraftKings. Approximately 99% of the funds misappropriated from the Jaguars’ VCC were gambling losses, almost all of which occurred on those two websites…Mr. Patel suffers from a serious gambling addiction, and in the spring of this year, checked himself into extensive, inpatient rehabilitation to address his addiction.”

At his sentencing hearing in court, one of Patel’s high school teachers said he was a model student. Patel was elected class president at the Paxon School for Advanced Studies in Jacksonville and was the captain of the school’s lacrosse team, according to The Athletic.

Patel told the court, “It began small and then snowballed so big that my only thought was to gamble my way out of it. In the end, I always thought that big win was right around the corner and would fix all my problems.”

At Patel’s sentencing, Megha Parekh, Jaguars chief legal officer, read a statement on behalf of the team, ESPN reported: “We gave him his dream job. We trusted him…We broke bread with him…He betrayed us. We take no joy in his punishment…Amit broke our hearts.”