Reported by Gabrielle Fonrouge and Dan Mangan

A former fugitive in the securities fraud case involving a New Jerseydeli company once valued at $100 million renounced his U.S. citizenship in 2019, prosecutors revealed Thursday as they asked a judge to deny him bail.

Peter Coker Jr. “poses a serious risk of flight, and … there are no conditions or combination thereof that can assure his appearance at future proceedings,” said the letter by the U.S. Attorney’s Office to federal Magistrate Judge Edward Kiel.

In the same letter, prosecutors said Coker Jr. had “stood to make tens of millions of dollars” from a hoped-for reverse merger of the deli company, which the goal of the “complex, long-term fraud’ spanning at least seven years that grossly inflated its stock price.

“And the only reason that the Defendant and his co-conspirators were unable to achieve their ultimate objective of entering into a reverse merger, which would have allowed for a massive payout, was because of negative news articles that exposed their fraud,” the letter to Kiel said.

Coker Jr., Coker Sr. and James Patten were charged in an indictment on Sept. 26 with a scheme artificially boost the prices of publicly traded stocks of Hometown International, and a related shell company, E-Waste, to increase their attractiveness as merger partners for private companies.

The indictment alleges that as a result of the scheme, the stock price of Hometown, which owned only a small, money-losing shop dubbed Your Hometown Deli, rose more than 900% as a result of the alleged scheme. E-Waste’s shares skyrocketed by almost 20,000%. The deli, which served Italian subs and cheesesteaks in Paulsboro, a small New Jersey town across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, has since closed.

Read full report: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/03/23/nj-deli-fraud-defendant-renounced-us-citizenship.html