Canadian billionaire Robert Miller, 80, was arrested at his Montreal home Thursday and faces 21 sex crime charges, including sexual assault, sexual exploitation of minors and obtaining sexual services for consideration.
Miller, founder and former owner of electronics distributor Future Electronics, is alleged to have committed the crimes against 10 women, eight of whom were minors at the time, over a period spanning 1994 to 2006. The arrest comes after Montreal police led a year-long investigation prompted by a CBC News/Radio-Canada report in which ten women stated that Miller paid them for sexual services while they were underage. Additional accusers have since come forward, Montreal Police said Thursday.
Miller is in the final stages of Parkinson’s disease and cardiac illnesses, according to his attorneys, and in a statement police said Miller was unable to appear in court Thursday due to health concerns. Police released Miller on the condition he appears in court on July 3.
Miller denied the allegations cited in the CBC/Radio-Canada article, and following his arrest vowed to “vigorously protect his reputation, fight for the truth and refuse these false allegations.”
The billionaire stepped down as CEO of Future Electronics in February 2023 and in April sold the company to Taiwan-based WT Microelectronics, cashing out in a $3.8 billion deal. Forbes estimates his net worth to be $2.6 billion.
Thursday was an eventful day for billionaire brushes with the law. A jury also found former President Donald Trump guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in an attempt to influence the 2016 election, making Trump the first former or sitting president to ever be convicted of criminal charges.
Trump now awaits sentencing and could face up to 136 years in prison and fines of up to $170,000, though he may end up with home confinement or probation. Trump, who is likely to appeal, claimed innocence outside the courtroom Thursday, calling the ruling a “disgrace” and denounced the trial as “rigged.”
Miller and Trump are the latest billionaires to be placed in handcuffs, but they are far from the only ones.
Scores of other current and former members of the three-comma club have faced everything from a night in jail to life in prison for crimes ranging from insider trading to narcotics trafficking.
Here are a handful of the most notable billionaire arrests and sentences:
Joaquín Guzmán Loera (aka El Chapo)
Sentence: Life in prison plus 30 years
Behind bars: 5 years and counting
Net worth: Drop-off, 2013
Known as El Chapo, Guzmán Loera is one of the most infamous drug lords in history. In 2019, he was convicted in the U.S. on 10 counts of money laundering and narcotics trafficking. Once the leader of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, Guzmán Loera helped illegally move hundreds of tons of cocaine into the U.S. from the early 1980s through the time of his arrest and extradition to the U.S. in 2017. He is now serving a life sentence and was ordered to pay $12.6 billion in forfeiture.
Allen Stanford
Sentence: 110 years
Behind bars: 11 years and counting
Net worth: Drop-off, 2009
The perpetrator of one of the largest Ponzi schemes ever committed, Stanford was sentenced to 110 years in 2012 for selling $7 billion of fraudulent certificates of deposits through the Stanford International Bank in Antigua. Stanford, 74, was required to pay a personal money judgment of nearly $6 billion. Some of the money was intended to go to the victims of his crimes and their families, but many of Stanford’s former clients reportedly have not received any money. Stanford is now serving one of the longest prison sentences ever handed to a billionaire. (Bernie Madoff, whose $18 billion scheme was even bigger, was never listed by Forbes as a billionaire; Madoff died in 2021 behind bars.)
Sam Bankman-Fried
Sentence: 25 years
Behind bars: 2 months and counting
Net worth: Drop-off, 2022
Formerly one of the richest people in cryptocurrency, Bankman-Fried launched FTX in 2019 and grew it into one of the leading crypto exchanges before his house of cards collapsed when it surfaced that he had misappropriated billions’ of dollars of customer funds. A federal judge in New York sentenced Bankman-Fried to 25 years in prison and ordered him to pay $11 billion in forfeiture on seven counts of conspiracy, wire fraud, securities fraud and money laundering related to FTX’s fall.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky
Sentence: 13 years
Behind bars: 10 years
Net worth: Drop-off, 2006
Platon Lebedev
Sentence: 13 years
Behind bars: 10 years
Net worth: Drop-off, 2004
The former leaders of Russian oil and gas company Yukos were arrested by Russian authorities for tax evasion in 2003 and sentenced to 13 years in prison each. Both were scheduled for release in 2011 but were convicted a second time in 2010 for embezzling more than 200 million tons of oil and laundering the proceeds, extending their sentence through 2016. Khodorkovsky, who was released in December 2013 after a pardon from Vladimir Putin, alleged that Putin manipulated the trial. Lebedev was released early the following year. Khodorkovsky remains an outspoken leader of the “Russian opposition.”
Elizabeth Holmes
Sentence: 11 years
Behind bars: 1 year and counting
Net worth: Drop-off, 2017
Now known for one of the highest profile cases of fraud in Silicon Valley history, Holmes was once the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire, with an estimated net worth of $4.5 billion in 2014, at age 30. As the founder of medical device company Theranos, Holmes led the company to raise more than $700 million from investors including billionaires Rupert Murdoch and Larry Ellison. Holmes falsely claimed she had developed technology that could detect hundreds of diseases with just a drop of someone’s blood. In 2022, she was convicted of fraud and conspiracy for lying to investors about the capabilities of her devices and has been ordered to pay $452 million in restitution to investors.
Raj Rajaratnam
Sentence: 11 years
Behind bars: 8 years
Net worth: Drop-off, 2010
Rajaratnam founded New York hedge fund Galleon Group in the 1990s before he was arrested for insider trading in 2009 and the company collapsed. At the time, Galleon managed more than $7 billion in assets. He was convicted of 14 counts of fraud and conspiracy and was later sentenced to 11 years in prison. In early 2019, Rajaratnam was released to home confinement, in part due to Kim Kardashian, who lobbied for the First Step Act, a law signed by Trump that grants early release to some non-violent offenders who are over 60 years of age. Rajaratnam stayed in home confinement for two years until being released in 2021.
Michael Milken
Sentence: 10 years
Behind bars: 2 years
Net worth: $6.5 billion
Milken expanded the market for high-yield junk bond financing in the 1980s while at investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert. He pled guilty in 1990 to six counts of securities and tax violations during his time at Drexel after an investigation by former U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani. Milken served two years in prison and paid $600 million in fines; he was also banned for life from the securities industry. Since being released in 1993, Milken has been dedicated to philanthropy, giving to causes such as prostate cancer research, as a survivor of the disease. He also founded and chairs the Milken Institute economic think tank, which hosts the annual Milken Global Conference. Trump pardoned Milken in 2020.
Thomas Kwok
Sentence: 7.5 years
Behind bars: 3 years
Net worth: $1.8 billion
Kwok inherited Hong Kong real estate investment firm Sun Hung Kai Properties along with his two brothers, Raymong and Walter, from their father in 1990. After serving for three years as co-chair of the company, Kwok was sentenced to five years in prison in 2014 for giving a $1.1 million (HK $8.5 million) bribe to Rafael Hui, then-Hong Kong chief secretary, in exchange for government favor. The billionaire was released from prison in 2019 after serving less than half of his original sentence. Hui, meanwhile, was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison for taking the bribes.
John Kapoor
Sentence: 5.5 years
Behind bars: 3.5 years
Net worth: Drop-off, 2019
Kapoor, founder and former CEO and chairman of opioid manufacturer Insys Therapeutics, was sentenced to five and a half years in prison in 2020 for conspiring to bribe doctors to prescribe fentanyl spray Subsys to patients who didn’t need it. Prior to that, a jury found Kapoor and four other Insys executives guilty of racketeering conspiracy. Kapoor was released to home confinement in June 2023 and was fully released six months later.
Jay Y. Lee
Sentence: 5 years
Behind bars: 18 months
Net worth: $10.1 billion
The executive chairman of South Korean conglomerate Samsung Electronics, Lee initially faced a five-year sentence for bribing the country’s then-President Park Geun-hye to support a merger between Samsung C&T and Cheil Industries. He spent 11 months in prison in 2017 before his sentence was suspected. That decision was later overturned and Lee was sent back to jail in 2021, serving an additional seven months before being released on parole and, in 2022, pardoned.
S. Curtis Johnson
Sentence: 4 months
Behind bars: 3 months
Net worth: $4.9 billion
Heir to the SC Johnson fortune, S. Curtis Johnson was charged in 2011 with the sexual assault of his then-teenage stepdaughter in the fourth degree and disorderly conduct. Johnson took a plea deal after a three-year litigation battle and after the victim did not give up her medical records, landing him four months in jail and a $6,000 fine. Johnson has no involvement in the family’s business but owns a stake in the company.
Joe Lewis
Sentence: 3 years probation
Net worth: $6.5 billion
The U.K. billionaire behind investment company Tavistock Group, Lewis was sentenced to three years of probation and a $5 million fine in April after pleading guilty to insider trading charges. He admitted to passing information about four publicly traded companies to his girlfriend, personal pilot, employees and friends. Prosecutors requested to impose penalties less than the 18 to 24 months behind bars called for in federal sentencing guidelines due to Lewis’ age, health issues, cooperation in the investigation and damage to his reputation.
