Some background to Mel Tari, the fraudster evangelist who stayed with John Dalli in the Bahamas

Mel Tari is ringed in red. John Dalli is on the sofa with his daughter Louisa Dalli and Mary Swan/Lady Bird. This photograph was taken in the Bahamas in August 2012, at a villa rented by Dalli’s other daughter Claire Gauci Borda for a year.

Mel Tari, the fraudster evangelist preacher born in Indonesia, who is now a US citizen. He was found by a California court to have defrauded a woman, who was one of his followers, of her inheritance, and ordered to pay her $1.1 million.

When John Dalli was in the Bahamas in August 2012 – this was a longer stay than the flying 24-hour visit he made in July when he sneaked away from a meeting of European Commissioners – one of his companions at the daughter rented by his daughter Claire Gauci Borda (for a year) was Mel Tari.

Mel Tari is one of those notorious American evangelists whose ‘spreading the word’ is just a way of gaining the trust of the vulnerable and convincing them to part with their money, to his benefit. He was born and raised in Indonesia but at some point became a US citizen.

He has been at it for years. As far back as 1994, he was ordered by a California court to pay $1.1 million to an heiress, Christine Kline, who he had defrauded out of her inheritance. She had asked him for help in setting up a trust fund so that she could live off the proceeds while doing missionary work, and instead he took the money and put it into his own company, All Seasons Resorts, in which he was a 33% shareholder while the now-notorious Ray Novelli owned the rest.

All Seasons Resorts later filed for bankruptcy, which the US authorities found to be fraudulent, and Novelli fled the United States for Mexico, pursued by at least 70 claims for fraud and a US tax bill of around $10 million.

He is still in Baja California Sur, where he has acquired protection by befriending the governor and is the subject of many accusations of corruption in the press there.

It is not known where Mel Tari lives, but he continues to preach, publish, sell his books and live off the vulnerable.

In one of his religious revival books, The Kingdom (excerpts shown in screenshots here) Tari proudly describes how he and Ray Novelli acquired All Seasons Resorts “by a miracle”, and how they raised funds under the umbrella of “doing God’s work and building the Kingdom”.

The donations were made to their ‘non-profit’ organisations, including Convicts for Christian Fellowship International, where Ray Novelli and his wife Marlies were president and treasurer, and their associate Curtis Bain was secretary. The charitable exempt status of this organisation was soon revoked by the US Tax Office because of non-compliance with minimum filing requirements.

When All Seasons Resorts faced bankruptcy (deemed to be fraudulent), these same people side-stepped into a new corporate structure which they called the Apollo Group. They filed for voluntary receivership of All Seasons Resorts, but this was rejected by the courts as being made “in bad faith”.

Yet they managed to asset-strip All Seasons Resorts, only to find the US Tax Office chasing them at the Apollo Group for the unpaid tax liabilities of All Seasons Resorts. Orders of seizure were made out against the Novelli family. A large sum was spent on lawyers in courts all over California and Nevada.

Then Ray Novelli fled.

The most famous of Mel Tari’s religious revival books is called Like the Mighty Wind. This is about his life in Indonesia, where he claimed he and other Christians walked on water to flee Muslim persecutors, raised the dead, and ministered powerfully in an Indonesian Christian revival, leading thousands away from Mohammed unto the Lord.

In a video which you will find on YouTube, he explains how he was miraculously healed from malaria during an encounter with the Lord.

Mel Tari is one of those fraudsters who sees people’s problems as a business opportunity. In the aftermath of a recent Indonesian disaster, he made an appeal for donations:

“My name is Mel Tari, I am an evangelist and author of the book Like a Mighty Wind. Indonesia is my home country and I am personally organizing a response to the disaster there. You can be assured that the funds you contribute to this ministry will make it directly to the people in need.”

Now back to Ray Novelli, who is still in El Coyote in Baja California Sur, Mexico. The Baja weekly news magazine, Zeta, had a cover story (picture uploaded here) on Novelli recently, describing how he defrauded many investors in the US with his companies, All Seasons Resorts, Travel America and The Apollo Group, and how he filed for bankruptcy on all of them, never returned any assets or paid any creditors. It reported that when he fled in 2000, he had 77 criminal charges against him in the US, and that more have been filed against him since.

After keeping a low profile in Mexico for seven years, in 2007 Ray Novelli emerged again with the announcement of a development project in La Paz. He called it Maravia, and it was to be a tourist resort on 750,000 hectares of land. But the real owners of the land filed a criminal suit against him for taking over their property illegally, and selling plots of their land to unsuspecting buyers.

In 2010 he was caught driving a stolen Hummer with false plates. This made the news in his part of Mexico (see pictures), and it was also reported that he told off those who arrested him by saying he was a friend of the governor.

A year later, still out of prison, he sent a single bulldozer onto the Maravia site, and was faced with a FEPA (the equivalent of the MEPA) enforcement order to stop works. It had all been arranged – this gave him the perfect alibi for not delivering and he never returned the money people had paid him.