Jay Peak was purchased by Quiros and Stenger in 2008. They soon turned to the EB-5 Program for funding, which is when a foreign investor put $500,000 into a project in a struggling region of the United States in order to receive a green card or permanent U.S. citizenship. Over 800 investors from seventy countries put money into these projects.
During their ownership, a large number of capital projects took place at Jay Peak and Burke. During that timeframe, Jay Peak got new lifts, multiple hotels, an indoor waterpark, a golf course, an indoor skating rink, and more. In 2012, they purchased the relatively nearby Burke Mountain, adding a hotel in the following years. Locals appreciated the changes, but mistrust grew over time. Some of these instances included the renaming of Burke Mountain to Q Burke in honor of Quiros’s last name, and the fractured relationship between ownership and Kingdom Trails, angering locals.
The most blatant example of EB-5 fraud came from their planned projects in Newport, Vermont, specifically for a brand-new biomedical center. $80 million was raised for the project, but construction never took place. Federal investigators found that the group misused $200 million of the $450 million raised for the various projects in the Northeast Kingdom. Quiros in particular spent $50 million on luxury items such as a fancy condo in New York City.
Since 2016, Jay Peak and Burke have been run under a receivership, with both resorts regaining trust among the local community. Jay Peak is expected to be sold this summer, while Burkes’s fate is less certain.