Tiburon financier Mark Hanf pleads guilty in Pacific Private Money fraud
Tiburon resident Mark Hanf pleaded guilty Sept. 30 to federal fraud and money-laundering charges, admitting he deceived investors in his Novato lending firm and agreeing to repay them at least $71.8 million.
Hanf, 66, the founder and former chief executive of Pacific Private Money, entered the pleas before U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley in San Francisco, a week after Hoai-Nam Chu Phan, 58, of Novato, the firm’s former chief operating officer, pleaded guilty Sept. 23 to the same wire-fraud conspiracy count.
Both men pleaded guilty to every count they faced, reversing the not-guilty pleas each entered Sept. 1.
Phan is set to be sentenced at 10 a.m. Feb. 10 and Hanf at 10 a.m. Feb. 17. Each faces a maximum of 20 years in prison on the conspiracy count, and Hanf 10 more on the money-laundering count, though maximum terms are rarely imposed and the judge will weigh the federal sentencing guidelines.
Victims addressed the court at both hearings, according to the court’s minutes, which do not record what they said. Corley referred both men to U.S. Probation for presentence reports. Neither man was taken into custody, the minutes show.
Both men admitted misleading investors
As part of their pleas Hanf and Phan admitted defrauding investors through false statements and omissions about the funds’ financial condition, their use of new investors’ money to pay earlier investors who withdrew and the safety of the investments, from December 2021 through December 2025, according to prosecutors. They admitted releasing “sanitized financial statements” that misled investors, manipulating the loan tapes — the schedules of loans a fund holds — shown to at least one investor and telling a corporate investor the firm still owned loans they knew had already been sold.
Pacific Private raised about $106.7 million from investors over that four-year span, prosecutors said. That is more than the roughly $103 million cited in the Aug. 31 charging document. The plea agreements are not open to the public in the court file.
Both men agreed to pay restitution of no less than $71,790,425, prosecutors said.
Hanf also admitted moving about $12,000 from a Pacific Private fund bank account to his personal account to pay his home mortgage in May 2025. The money-laundering count rests on a $12,162.36 mortgage payment made May 5, 2025, from a Wells Fargo checking account.
“As alleged, these defendants falsely assured investors that Pacific Private Money was successful and profitable, knowing that continued losses had turned it into a Ponzi scheme,” U.S. Attorney Craig H. Missakian said when the charges were announced last month.
The road to the pleas
The pleas cap a collapse that became public in March, when the Marin County District Attorney’s Office was reviewing complaints from investors who had been told most of their money was gone. Two of Pacific Private’s funds had stopped paying distributions and redemptions in October 2025, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
California’s Department of Financial Protection and Innovation suspended the firm’s lending license March 16 and revoked it April 6. On May 4 it ordered Hanf, Phan and six Pacific Private entities to stop selling securities in California through untrue or misleading statements, finding they had raised at least $139 million from more than 400 investors across five funds since 2013.
U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, asked the FBI and the SEC on April 1 to investigate. A week later a group of investment funds filed a federal racketeering suit alleging $75.8 million in investor money had been routed to Hanf-controlled companies. Thirteen Pacific Private entities filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection June 16.
The SEC sued both men Sept. 1, and each settled that day, consenting to judgments that would permanently bar him from the securities business and leave the court to set what each owes later: disgorgement and a penalty for Hanf, a penalty alone for Phan. As of Oct. 1, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers had not acted on the commission’s motion to approve them, and no filing had been made in the case since Sept. 4. She has set a case management conference, a scheduling hearing with the parties, for Dec. 14.
The SEC case covers two of the funds, which it says raised more than $80 million from about 190 investors, many of them retired, between December 2021 and November 2025. By February 2026, according to the commission, recoverable assets in those funds were estimated at less than $17 million against nearly $121 million owed — less than 15 cents on the dollar.
The FBI and IRS Criminal Investigation investigated the criminal case, which is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Christiaan Highsmith and Patrick O’Brien.
Investors can reach the bankruptcy claims agent at veritaglobal.net/ppm.
Reach Executive Editor Kevin Hessel at 415-435-2652.