HOUSTON – A Mexico City businessman whose reported death in 2016 was worth $26 million to his wife may have been alive and working as an accountant 14 months later, a private investigator testified Wednesday in a federal courtroom in Houston.
The investigator, Oscar Abraham, never saw Eduardo Rosendi, whose purported death is at the center of a courtroom brawl between, on one hand, Transamerica Corp. and Pruco Life Insurance Co., a subsidiary of Prudential Financial, and, on the other, Blanca Monica Villarreal, who says the insurance giants are unlawfully withholding the millions in insurance payments.
But in March 2018, Abraham said, he talked to two people at an office building in Mexico City who identified Rosendi as a regular visitor. Villarreal, seeking payout on Rosendi’s life-insurance policies, told the insurers her husband died Dec. 29, 2016, and was quickly cremated.
The investigator’s testimony, on the third day of a jury trial before Chief U.S. District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal, was the strongest evidence to date to support the insurers’ contention that Villarreal and Rosendi faked his death so she could claim the $26 million in benefits owed under policies issued by Transamerica and Pruco.
Villarreal’s lawyer, Mikal C. Watts of San Antonio’s Watts Guerra, should have his opportunity Thursday to cross-examine Abraham, once direct examination by Jason Bernhardt of Winstead, a member of the insurers’ legal team, concludes.
Based on earlier testimony and arguments in pretrial court filings, Watts will hammer at an ambiguity in Abraham’s account:
The investigator said he told a receptionist and a security guard at an office where Rosendi may have worked that Abraham was looking for Rosendi. He showed them a photo of Rosendi. In response, both indicated that they knew him (the receptionist, Laura Hernandez, said he’d been in just that morning) but in response to Abraham’s questioning referred to the man only as “the accountant” and not by name.
Lawyers for the insurers will argue that, in context, the identification in exchanges to which Abraham testified is clear:
Investigator (holding up photo): I’m looking for Eduardo Rosendi.
Receptionist: The accountant hasn’t arrived yet.
Watts will argue that many accountants worked at the office and that the receptionist never used Rosendi’s name in identifying “the accountant” from the photo.
The trial is expected to conclude next week.