A business executive labelled a “fugitive” by the United States government is living and working from a €2.9 million home in Rathgar, south Dublin, with a Bentley parked outside. Jason Cardiff is charged with four offences in California over the alleged fraudulent running of a homeopathic medicine company.He told The Irish Times he is confident the Trump administration will soon dismiss the charges.The charges Cardiff is facing could bring a prison sentence of up to 20 years. Despite facing attempts to extradite him back to California, he says he is not worried.Sitting in a Rathgar restaurant on Wednesday, Cardiff, who obtained Irish citizenship 20 years ago through a grandfather who hails from Roscommon, claims he has made an application to the US department of justice for $56 million (€48 million) in compensation from the mooted “anti-weaponisation fund” – the fund the Trump administration planned to set up (but was challenged by US politicians) that would compensate people who claim to be victims of a weaponised government.Cardiff’s claim includes money he said he lost when the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the US consumer watchdog, took over and closed a mask factory he established during the Covid pandemic.He alleges that he has been a victim of a “government pile-on” by officials and judges appointed by former US presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden who are unjustly targeting him and his companies. Cardiff (50) has been in an eight-year battle with American law enforcement. In 2018 the FTC froze the assets of Cardiff, his wife Eunjung and their company Redwood Scientific. A court later found they had made unsubstantiated claims about the effectiveness of dissolvable oral strips marketed through TV infomercials and social media for boosting male sexual performance, weight loss and smoking cessation. Jason Cardiff with his oral strip product. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw/The Irish Times One claim made by Cardiff’s company was that its product “Prolongz” was “clinically proven” to increase ejaculatory control in more than 97 per cent of men. FTC experts showed the pilot study used by Redwood was unreliable due to the small sample size.While their assets were supposed to be frozen, in 2020 a judge ruled that Cardiff and his wife, who had a senior role in Redwood, had “lied”. They were found to be in contempt of court over “lavish” spending by using a credit card in the name of Cardiff’s then 90-year-old father Gerald.The Cardiffs were spending nearly $17,000 per month on lease payments on Bentley, Porsche and Range Rover cars, private school fees, restaurants, pet grooming and music and taekwondo lessons, among other expenditure. Cardiff now claims that the court, in its contempt ruling, was “enforcing an asset freeze and receivership structure that we contend lacked lawful foundation”.Although the FTC had sought to reclaim $18.2 million from the Cardiffs and their company for the fraudulent activity, it was precluded from doing so after a 2021 supreme court decision found the FTC did not have the legal authority to do so. A 2022 court ruling noted that Cardiff, who featured in many of the adverts, admitted that he was not a scientific expert and did not understand everything about the thin strip technology he was selling.The court found the Cardiffs unfairly enrolled consumers in auto-ship plans where they are sent products without their consent, failed to honour refund policies and guarantees, used fake testimonials, made false “Made-in-the-USA” claims and made illegal robocalls. The judge also found the Cardiffs made deceptive earnings claims as part of a multilevel marketing scheme – similar to a pyramid scheme.The Cardiffs and their company were barred from carrying out deceptive marketing practices.After the FTC case concluded, Cardiff moved to Ireland in 2022 with his wife and daughter. When returning to Los Angeles in 2023 to see his sick father he was arrested and charged with four offences: access device fraud, aggravated identity theft and two counts of witness tampering. A US department of justice briefing said “Cardiff directed his employees to use the credit and debit card information associated with previous customers to charge for additional products that those customers had not ordered”, calling his actions “a blatant rip off”. Cardiff has pleaded not guilty and has alleged wrongdoing by the prosecutor. “We just went through this litigation civilly,” he told The Irish Times this week. “The company was handed back to me. Why are we going through it again now? It’s the exact same issues we just went through.”Cardiff claims his company had stopped selling directly to customers before the FTC’s intervention in 2018 and was solely concentrating on its smoking cessation product. He argues that he has been targeted due to the influence of nicotine patch companies who fear a rival product.“There are no victims,” he says. Jason Cardiff says he loves living in Ireland and will 'absolutely' make Ireland 'the manufacturing hub' for the new product, once the product receives regulatory approval. Photograph Nick Bradshaw/The Irish Times He claims the evidence presented by the department of justice only shows alleged losses of $154.Asked for evidence to support his claim, Cardiff says he could only share this “through counsel, subject to any protective order or confidentiality restrictions”.Asked if he has any regrets about his actions, Cardiff said: “You can always do things better.” “I don’t think the company was blatantly negligent in anything that it did,” he said. “With 750,000 customers, and you got 22 complaints for $154. Something’s not connecting there, right?” Cardiff was allowed to return to Ireland on bail but has since said he cannot return based on medical advice. Two friends who put up $500,000 and $30,000 for his bail have had to forfeit those deposits. Cardiff claims he has “covered that”.“I would never disobey a court order,” he says. “I have aggressive adult asthma, which leads to something called Syncope syndrome. I can start coughing and pass out.”He says his medical advice is not to travel. The US department of justice has questioned the expertise of his Irish doctors, pointing out that one seemed to specialise in gynaecological medicine. Cardiff, who has registered two companies in Ireland, says Redwood is working on a new product to help those addicted to vapes. The businessman claims he has no active role in Redwood in the United States and his shares are held in a blind trust.He said he loves living in Ireland and will “absolutely” make Ireland “the manufacturing hub” for the new product, once the product receives regulatory approval.He has written two self-help books, including one called Success at all Cost. “Winning at all cost isn’t about winning at all costs, as far as being ruthless; it’s about winning at all costs and doing it the right way,” he said.In the most recent filing from the US department of justice in his case, which bore the name of Todd Blanche, the acting US attorney general, it criticised Cardiff for wasting court and government resources with “frivolous motions while he remains a fugitive who is actively disobeying multiple court orders”. “Defendant has filed 38 ex parte [one side represented] applications, motions, replies and notices in this court, all while disobeying this court’s orders to return to the United States. The government maintains that motions filed while defendant remains a fugitive may be denied pursuant to the fugitive disentitlement doctrine,” the department said.“I’m not a fugitive,” Cardiff says in response, claiming there are no grounds to extradite him. “I was allowed to come to Ireland by court order,” he said. “They would have to come up with a new charge. Then you get into Irish warrant law and bail law.” He claims there is “so much corruption in this case”. “That’s why Ireland’s such a great country in the first place. This kind of stuff doesn’t happen here,” he says.“If you were to go to a big Irish company and say that the Irish Government is freezing all your assets because you violated an advertising rule and then go back to that company and say: ‘Oh, sorry, we spent all your money and we had no right to those assets,’ there’d be a civil war in this country if you did that.”Cardiff believes the case against him will likely be withdrawn. He has raised his complaints with some senior people in the department of justice (without naming them) and highlighted how it allegedly breaches a “no-piling on” directive introduced by Trump to prevent businesses from facing multiple prosecutions.“The case is almost over,” he said. “We’re very close. Now we have the attention of the right people. I think this will bring this case to a close very quickly.”