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SALT LAKE CITY — Former UTA board member Terry Diehl has withdrawn his request for attorney fees in the abandoned criminal case against him after reaching a settlement with the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
The agreement includes an undisclosed financial award that his attorney, Loren Washburn, called “significant” in a news release Monday. Washburn also said federal prosecutors confirmed they do not have any open investigations in which Diehl is the purported target.
The government charged Diehl with five counts of filing a false declaration and seven counts of concealing assets in connection with his Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization in 2012, and later added tax evasion and filing a false tax return last year.
But prosecutors dropped the case just before the trial after a judge precluded them from presenting what they said was key evidence. Dave Backman, the criminal division chief of the U.S Attorney's Office, acknowledged at the time that prosecutors made mistakes that led them to drop the charges.
Diehl sought attorney fees under the Hyde Amendment, a law that allows a person wrongly accused of a crime to obtain compensation. In the settlement, which Washburn said is rare and receiving a payment is "virtually unheard of," the government does not admit to any wrongdoing.
Washburn said in a statement that Diehl endured years of "reckless and cavalier accusations and assumptions" by the media during his time at UTA, which ended nearly a decade ago.
"As shown by this settlement, the investigation by the FBI that spent countless taxpayer-funded hours by investigators, prosecutors and the courts ended without any showing that Mr. Diehl violated a single law," Washburn said.
Melodie Rydalch, U.S. Attorney's Office spokeswoman, agreed that settlements under the Hyde Amendment are rare. She said prosecutors reached the agreement to avoid further litigation.
"Like all settlements, nobody won and nobody lost," she said.
Prosecutors alleged Diehl failed to list a company called Skyline Ventures Associates Inc. in his bankruptcy filing for debt totaling $41.7 million. They also alleged Diehl omitted more than $1 million in income stemming from the sale of land to eBay adjacent to the UTA FrontRunner transit-oriented development in Draper.
