Trucking’s biggest insurance fraud and Jasbir Thandi’s guilty plea

Covering the hole required paperwork, and the paperwork is where this case earns its place in the fraud history hall of fame. Vermont regulators had asked Global Hawk to shore up its capital, so Thandi reported $13.6 million in contributions in 2017. The liquidator later compared the deposit receipts sent to Vermont against the real bank statements. Where the receipts said $3,000,000, the bank said $300. Where they said $3,600,000, the bank said $360. Where they said $1,000,000, the bank said $100. Somebody was photocopying deposit slips and adding zeros. The 2018 annual statement, signed under oath before a California notary by Thandi and his vice president, Sandeep Sahota, told Vermont the company held $44.9 million in cash at Stifel. The real combined balance was about $12.1 million. By the 2019 statement, the fiction had come fully loose from the ground: it claimed $17.9 million at Stifel, in accounts that had been closed for nearly a year. A monthly statement from the company’s investment adviser kept reporting balances, month after month, for accounts that no longer existed.

Then there are the ghost policies. Vermont had capped Global Hawk at $15.5 million in new business for 2019. So more than 500 policies simply never made it into the company’s records. The liquidator found them by comparing FMCSA’s insurance filing database against the broker’s own files: 512 policies, prefixes such as CALQ and NVLQ, the first effective in June 2019. More than half of all the new policies issued in Global Hawk’s final 11 months were off the books. Real trucks, real filings with the FMCSA, real certificates in the hands of shippers and brokers, and no insurer behind them who knew they existed.

The end came fast. In late April 2020, the Vermont captive manager, who also sat on the board, asked Thandi for the actual Stifel statements. He ignored the request. On May 1, the manager called Stifel and was told the authorized signatory had denied it. On May 6, he resigned from the board. Vermont seized the company on May 20, and a state court ordered liquidation on June 8, 2020. Global Hawk’s last annual statement had claimed $42.7 million in assets. The banks held $609,481. The liquidation order described the 1,008 trucks then on Global Hawk paper as effectively uninsured.

Why did he do it? The boring answer is the honest one. Global Century collected $5.2 million in fees from Global Hawk in 2017, $2.7 million in 2018, and $2.7 million more in 2019. The fraud was what kept the business model alive after the money was gone.

So where does accountability stand, six years later? On paper, it looks great. A federal court in Vermont entered a $66.7 million default judgment against Thandi and Global Century in 2023. All four criminal defendants, Thandi, Sahota, investment adviser Jaspreet Padda, and Gunjan Aggarwal, have pleaded guilty. Padda got 30 months in May. Aggarwal got 18 months in April. Sahota is sentenced on Aug. 14, and Thandi on Aug. 28. On July 2, Judge Tigar entered a stipulated restitution order of $38,829,382, split 85.5% to the Vermont liquidator and 14.5% to the Texas receiver for Houston General. The liquidator has also sued Crowe LLP, the national accounting firm that issued clean audit opinions on Global Hawk’s financial statements; Crowe denies liability, the case survived summary judgment motions this spring, and it remains unresolved.

Now what do the victims get? Vermont’s accounting in the restitution order tallies $38.5 million in Global Hawk liabilities, most of it policy claims, against roughly $5.2 million recovered: $1.5 million in cash found at liquidation, a $3.7 million settlement from Lloyd’s of London, and $55,000 from Padda. Everything else hinges on collecting restitution from a 70-year-old defendant whose lawyers filed a 2024 declaration supporting his request for appointed counsel because he could no longer pay them. The $66.7 million civil judgment sits against the same empty pockets.

In the same fraud, run by the same man, the Texas victims were paid, and the trucking victims were not. Houston General was a traditional insurer, so when it collapsed, the Texas Property and Casualty Insurance Guaranty Association stepped in and paid $4.8 million in claims, exactly as guaranty funds have done for every failed conventional insurer for half a century. Global Hawk was a risk retention group, and federal law, 15 U.S.C. 3902, bars RRGs from every state guaranty fund in America. No backstop exists. When an RRG dies, the crash victims stand in a liquidation line behind the lawyers and the accountants, and they take whatever fraction is left. The two halves of Thandi’s own conspiracy are a controlled experiment in what that statute costs, and the trucking side lost.

I have been building the dataset of what the dead RRGs left behind. My database of the three failed trucking RRGs, Global Hawk, Spirit Commercial Auto, and Federal Motor Carriers, covers 19,588 carriers that were insured by them at some point, with 49,812 crashes, 1,478 of them fatal, 1,770 people killed, and 23,519 injured across those carriers’ recorded histories. Global Hawk’s book was the largest of the three: 10,333 carriers. Isolate it, and those carriers account for 16,161 recorded crashes, 533 of them fatal, 644 deaths, and 7,388 injuries. 417 of those carriers have at least one fatal crash in their records. Of the 10,333, some 3,460 are still active in the federal carrier census today, and 6,873 are gone. 2,748 of them show an insurance filing of record in the federal system from Global Hawk itself, including 131 carriers whose census records are active today. The insurer has been dead for six years. The paper does not know it, and neither does anyone relying on the paperwork.

Every one of those crash victims who had a claim pending against a Global Hawk insured in June 2020 learned the same lesson James Richardson learned on the Spirit side of my dead book: he won a $1 million settlement against a Spirit-insured carrier in Illinois and collected nothing, because the insurance behind it had already been spent. An Illinois appellate court called it a great unfairness and said the law gave it no remedy. That is still the law. Nothing enacted since 2020 screens who may form or run a risk retention group, nothing stops the operator of a failed one from chartering the next one, and nothing gives the family of someone killed by an RRG-insured truck a dollar of protection when the RRG turns out to be a photocopier and a story.

Thandi will get his sentence on Aug. 28. The 1,008 truck owners who paid real premiums for imaginary coverage, the shippers who accepted those certificates, and the people hit by those trucks have already gotten theirs.