Trish Duggan, Scientology’s richest, is keeping another donor in jail in… Switzerland?
Calls from Ivan Gaspari tend to come in the late afternoon, and under the name “Restricted.”
He can only call from the Swiss jail he’s being held in at certain times of the day, and for only short periods.
But over several weeks he phones somewhat regularly, saying that he is sure that he’ll be released from custody any day now, only to find out that he’s going to be held even longer.
Gaspari, 53, was arrested last June, but the public prosecutor in Lugano, Switzerland, Veronica Lipari, has not asked for a trial date, and in fact she has not charged Gaspari with a crime.
Under Swiss law, Gaspari is being held in custody because of a complaint by a private party, and Lipari is holding him as she investigates the circumstances of that complaint.
From an American perspective, that’s an unusual situation. It would be something like if someone who loaned you money accused you of stealing from them, and the district attorney put you in jail for several months as they tried to find out if you were actually guilty of something.
That’s how Swiss court documents describe the situation as Gaspari has now been held in custody for almost a full year.
But what makes it even more unusual is that Gaspari is a major donor to Scientology who is sitting in a Swiss jail because the private complaint against him was made by the richest Scientologist in the world, Clearwater, Florida artist Trish Duggan, who accuses Gaspari of stealing from investments she made in his steel trading company.
Gaspari counters that Duggan knew that the money she was investing was intended to be used, in part, to make donations to the Church of Scientology.
He wasn’t stealing from Duggan, he insists, he was doing what they both, as longtime Scientologists, were dedicated to do: Enrich the church, which has such a focus on large donations from wealthy individuals.
Gaspari says he’s bewildered at Duggan turning on him and asking for him to be prosecuted.
“I am here without even an accusation. They are just making investigations,” he complains on one of his telephone calls.
Duggan’s attorney Steven Hayes, meanwhile, testified to Swiss authorities that he “didn't care” how Gaspari allocated several million dollars that went missing, the facts show Gaspari is a criminal and they want him prosecuted.
“I don’t care what he did with it. He has stolen,” Hayes said in an official interrogation.
Gaspari continues to wait for the prosecutor, Lipari, to investigate, with no trial date set, and no idea whether he’ll be released in the meantime.
Lipari has not responded to two inquiries from the Underground Bunker in recent weeks. Trish Duggan and Steven Hayes also have not responded to our questions.
Ivan Gaspari says he got involved in Scientology in 2002, and in 2016 moved his family from the Italian-speaking region of Switzerland to Clearwater, where the church has its “spiritual mecca,” the Flag Land Base.
Only there could he take part in some of Scientology’s higher levels on the “Bridge to Total Freedom,” including such experiences as “Super Power” and “the Ls,” which run tens of thousands of dollars each.
Gaspari was under intense pressure to make additional donations as well, and he would eventually reach the level of “Diamond Meritorious,” after he had personally given $5 million to the International Association of Scientologists (IAS), the church’s membership organization. (An IAS receipt shows that he and his family were only $693,340 away from attaining the next step, “Diamond Meritorious With Honors” at $7.5 million, in late 2022.)
Like other wealthy donors, Gaspari was assigned a particular Scientology “registrar” to solicit those gifts. In Gaspari's case, that was a “reg” by the name of Tyler Pirak.
Gaspari says that Pirak was well aware that for more than 20 years he had been in the steel trading business.
“One day Tyler wanted to visit my customers,” Gaspari said in one of his phone calls from jail. “Then he asked me to show him the figures, the profits. Then he asked me how I could increase my business, scale up. I told him I needed more money from banks.”
Gaspari says that Pirak told him he would “take care of it,” and at the IAS event in October 2018, he introduced him to Osman Ozsan, another Scientology donor and money manager in the Clearwater area.
“Let’s make a company together,” Gaspari says Ozsan told him.
Ozsan then invested $10 million by letter of credit from the Bank of America to a Swiss bank, Gaspari says. That bank then used it as collateral to give Gaspari the equivalent of $9 million in January 2019, and a new company was formed called “Ivancore,” after Gaspari himself.
Then, in March 2019, at an event to celebrate the March 13 birthday of Scientology’s founder L. Ron Hubbard (1911-1986), Gaspari was approached by Trish Duggan, who revealed to him for the first time that she was actually his investor, and that Ozsan was her money manager.
Among Scientology’s many millionaires, Trish Duggan stands out for her billions. She has repeatedly been named “Patron of Legend” by church leader David Miscavige as Scientology's greatest single donor. She and her ex-husband, Bob Duggan, estimate that they have given more than a third of a billion dollars to Scientology and its various initiatives.
Until Trish spoke up at the 2019 Birthday Event, however, Gaspari didn't know that she was actually behind the infusion of cash in his business.
Gaspari says that it was clear from Pirak that the purpose of the deal was to create a scaled-up company with bigger profits so that Gaspari could donate even more money to the IAS.
From that time in 2019, Gaspari says, Pirak was at his house nearly every week asking for donations from the new company, and that he also wanted a taste. “He was asking for three percent under the name of his sister,” Gaspari says, and he produces a 2022 email from Pirak’s sister, who told Gaspari she “heard that you are willing to pay a dividend this year based on our pro-rata shares in Ivancorp, which is very appreciated!!”
The email is proof that Ivancore had been created to generate donations for Scientology, and that Pirak and his sister expected a cut, Gaspari alleges.
By July 2022, Gaspari says, Ivancore had $120 million in credit in Switzerland and ten employees after starting from nothing. He says that Duggan, her attorney Hayes, and her money manager Ozsan owned 45 percent of the company but weren’t involved in running it.
At that point, however, Gaspari says he went to Duggan to make sure she knew that money from the company she had invested in was going to the IAS. “She said don't worry about it. We’ll do an agreement and you can pay it back in four years,” he says.
A deal was formalized by Hayes, Trish’s attorney, in November 2022, naming Gaspari CEO, giving him a salary plus a percentage of the profits, and obligating him to make payments over four years to replace what had been donated.
Then, two months later, in January 2023, everything changed, he says. Even though by that point Gaspari had returned almost $1 million to the company, he was told to leave the firm because Hayes and Duggan couldn’t work with him anymore.
“After January, we didn’t hear anything. It was a big shock. I had lost the company and its credit lines,” he says.
In April 2023, Gaspari’s wife met with Trish Duggan, trying to smooth over the situation.
“Trish was crying. ‘I want to help you,’ she was saying. ‘I love you guys.’ Meanwhile, the lawsuit was already set,” Gaspari says. Days earlier, Ferrum, one of Trish's companies, had filed suit against him.
“She knew the lawsuit was coming and was being fake with my wife, crying,” Gaspari says.
In June 2023, Gaspari was under so much stress he had a stroke. Two days after he returned to his home from the hospital, police arrived and picked him up. He’s been in custody ever since.
According to the Public Ministry of the Canton of Ticino in Lugano, Ivan Gaspari is being held under a criminal complaint of “aggravated unfaithful administration,” forgery, and money laundering, made by a “private complainant,” which is Ivancore, the company that was named for Gaspari and was created when Trish Duggan invested in him.
In other words, the Swiss state is prosecuting Gaspari under a complaint made by his own company, and he’s being held while the state itself does an investigation of the matter.
In July, that investigation included an interrogation of the “private accuser,” which was an interview of Steven Hayes, Trish Duggan’s attorney.
Steven Hayes has been a Scientologist since 1968, and he was personally involved in one of Scientology’s more notorious controversies: Its defeat and capture of an organization it considered a longtime enemy, the Cult Awareness Network (CAN).
Operating out of a Chicago suburb, CAN provided information for worried parents and other family members who were concerned about their loved ones joining cults. Scientology was particularly incensed at CAN’s influence, and fought it with numerous lawsuits. One of those lawsuits eventually toppled CAN in 1995, and its assets — including years’ worth of confidential files — went up for auction.
The buyer? Scientologist lawyer Steven Hayes.
Hayes said he was working with a group that was planning to reopen CAN so it “disseminates the truth about all religions.”
Hayes testified last July to Swiss authorities that he moved to Clearwater and has worked for Trish Duggan since 2017.
Bob and Trish Duggan were Scientology’s richest couple, personally worth about $4 billion, when they broke up at the end of 2015. A longtime entrepreneur, Bob Duggan had become a billionaire after investing in a small company called Pharmacyclics that enjoyed a bonanza over a promising new cancer drug. In 2015, Pharmayclics was acquired by the pharmaceutical giant AbbVie for $21 billion.
Besides Humira, the most popular prescription medicine in the world, AbbVie makes many other prescription drugs, including depakote, a drug used to treat bipolar disorder. (Scientology is normally opposed to all drugs used in psychiatry.)
From the sale of Pharmacyclics, which had made him a billionaire, Bob Duggan moved a million shares of AbbVie stock into the couple’s foundation. At that time the stock was worth about $59 million. According to a 2015 tax filing, the Duggans expected it would generate about $2.9 million a year in income, which they would only be giving to Scientology. (Later, they abandoned that plan and simply handed over about $45 million in Abbvie stock directly to Scientology, the foundation’s documents show.)
Through their pharmaceutical billions, Bob and Trish have donated more than $300 million to various Scientology initiatives, including leader David Miscavige’s “Ideal Org” program that upgrades church buildings around the world. Since their divorce, Bob has been seen less at Scientology events, but Trish continues to be celebrated by Miscavige as the church’s “Patron of Legend.”
Trish has also focused on her career as an artist who works in glass, setting up a major museum to her work in nearby St. Petersburg, Florida. A plan to open a similar facility in Clearwater fell through.
In March, the New York Times identified Trish Duggan as one of former President Donald Trump’s biggest individual donors, having given $5 million to his 2024 campaign.
At the end of 2018, Osman Ozsan told Steven Hayes that Trish Duggan wanted to make an investment in Ivan Gaspari, so Hayes created a company named Ferrum C LLC. “The family office separates investments through the specific creation of specific companies,” Hayes testified to Swiss authorities.
In a three-way call with Ozsan, Gaspari explained to Hayes that if he had $20 million in letters of credit, he could generate annual profits of $3 to 5 million.
Hayes said that Gaspari described being an intermediary, bringing together suppliers and buyers, and he agreed to put all his energies into the new company, Ivancore, and to set aside his previous company, KRC.
By early 2022, Ferrum (Trish's company) had invested $20 million in Ivancore.
“The public prosecutor asks me to take a position on Gaspari’s version which claims that Ivancore was created specifically to generate profits to then be used for donations in favor of the Church of Scientology. I dispute these statements. The intention was to invest $20 million in Ivancore. Mrs. Duggan first wanted to make a profit with this investment and then, with the profits, make donations,” Hayes testified. But he disputed the idea that the company would make those donations directly.
“The public prosecutor tells me that Gaspari claims that Ivancore’s profits should have been allocated to the Church anyway, and invites me to take a position. It’s a lie. I was there when this company was created. The idea was to create a commercial activity to generate the profits, it would not have made sense, otherwise the financier could have simply made donations directly using the same money.”
Hayes said it was around September 2022 that Ferrum began to realize that Ivancore had some obligations to “related parties,” and that it involved some of Gaspari’s other companies.
Ivancore had operating losses of $5 to 10 million, and to figure out why, Ferrum had to get control of it, Hayes said.
A series of agreements were signed, essentially cutting Gaspari out of the operation, because they had come to realize that he was a “criminal.”
“We discovered that Gaspari had purchased products with Ivancore’s money and had then transferred the same to his other companies, who had in turn sold them, collecting the money without paying the due amount to Ivancore,” Hayes said.
An example: Ivancore paid for some manganese to be transported, but it was then sold by another of Gaspari’s companies without reimbursing Ivancore.
By the end of 2022, they realized that there was a $10 million shortfall at Ivancore, and they terminated their relationship with Gaspari in January 2023.
Why did they decide to pursue a criminal case rather than simply sue Gaspari? “We believe that the only possibility to be able to recover our overdrafts is for the criminal authorities to find some assets to seize from Gaspari, otherwise everything Gaspari says is just lies.”
Hayes did acknowledge that Tyler Pirak was a registrar who had worked with Trish Duggan.
“Tyler Pirak works for the Church of Scientology and is good friends with Trish Duggan. He assists her when it comes to making donations or other church-related activities.”
The public prosecutor told Hayes that Gaspari claimed Pirak was “soliciting him to make donations, pointing out that he had the money that Duggan had put into Ivancore at his disposal.”
Hayes replied, “I find it really difficult to think that Pirak acted as Ivan reports, since it would be against the principles of the Church to obtain the money in the way Gaspari reported. This all seems very unusual to me.”
Hayes, in other words, was saying that it was against the “principles” of Scientology for a wealthy Scientologist to set up a company in order for it to supply donations directly to the church. But records show his boss, Trish Duggan, had done that exact same thing with her husband’s Abbvie profits in 2015.
Hayes did admit that there was a “certain insistence” on giving donations when he was asked if Scientology members are under pressure to give. And Hayes didn’t deny that Gaspari had given enough to be considered “Diamond Meritorious.”
But he said what Gaspari had done with the money he took from Ivancore was beside the point.
“I don't care what he did with it. He has stolen,” Hayes said.
Gaspari says that the entire scheme was based on creating a new company that could make profits that could be donated to Scientology. But then, he theorizes, Trish Duggan and Steven Hayes wanted to take over the company, cut him out, and perhaps give the company to the IAS.
“He’s lying about everything,” Gaspari says about the interview Hayes gave the Swiss prosecutors.
In the time that he’s been in jail, Gaspari has suffered another series of strokes, and has been hospitalized multiple times.
But he’s getting no indication from prosecutor Veronica Lipari about the results of her investigation or when a trial might be scheduled.
In a couple of weeks, he’ll pass a full year in custody.
We asked him whether he still considers himself a Scientologist.
“Frankly speaking, I feel like I woke up,” he said, and confirmed that he is no longer a member of the church.
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Good one! Such excellent explaining.
From Miscavige's view, Gaspari is the "out ethics" one in the wrong, otherwise Trish, if she's helping authorities investigate Gaspari's possible ripping her off, it must be with Miscavige's authorization that Gaspari's in the wrong.
Hubbard rules to let fellow Scientologists help authorities go after a fellow Scientologist can only do so with authorization.
Miscavige must agree with this, otherwise, if it's all on Trish's own steam to get Gaspari held responsible by authorities, it means she's already decided he's guilty and needs outside legal authorities to punish him. It kind of means Gaspari is afraid himself of the normal in house "church" arbitration which would be against him likely even harsher than would be outside legal authorities dealing with this money exchange issue between Trish and him.
But per the Hubbard rules, still, this is about the highest level ever failed Chaplain's arbitration. Fellow Scientologists ought to submit to a chaplains or WISE arbitration between each other. Miscavige has to be in on this conflict, the amounts of money are just too significant.
Money is the top consideration here, it's a lot of money Trish doesn't want going to this fellow Scientologist who she believes and has decided is doing wrong with it, so much so to NOT use Scientology arbitration rules to get her money back.
Going to authorities to get her money back, is not per Hubbard, obviously, it's not using the arbitration.
Gaspari also, himself, would do better even if he has to sit in jail for a while. If I were him, I'd rely on outside legal authorities and not his "church" who will be harsher on him to give back the money to Trish.
It appears, most likely, he's the one at fault though. Fighting over some huge amounts of money, and he's the sly one, glad in a way, if that is the truth, he's giving Trish some grief in life.
The "highest" OT Scientologists getting ripped off by one another, and suffering some pain for their "losses." Obviously her OT powers aren't working. She ought to realize she's thrown more money at Scientology stupidly than anyone on earth, but that realization will be slow in coming.
What a waste of money all around. Scientology doesn't deserve funding, period, give the money to country's tax piggybanks to benefit the whole country.
The trouble of being rich and throwing large piles of money around, trying to make more, what to say, these people have more than they'll ever ever need in ten lifetimes, of wealth, what creeps in history if you ask me.
One other thought, since Trish is helping authorities get her money back, that also means she does not believe in Scientology's "arbitration" in this instance, LOL. So much for faith in the home team's in house "justice" system, especially when it comes to "big" money disputes.
So the Church of Scientology was given substantial ownership of a company that makes psychiatric drugs. Wow!