Perhaps he violated the terms and conditions of his contract with ARIN and should have had the assignments cancelled but where does the criminality come in?
Creating shell companies is not illegal, using a name fir yourself that isn’t your legal name is not illegal, doing either of those things in order to trick people into giving you money is.
Are there grey areas? Sure. In particular there's a passive sort of deceit in which you let people assume things that you know aren't true, to your benefit. Mostly the law holds that it's their mistake for not asking, and anyway they'd usually be far too embarrassed to make a fuss if they realise their error.
I don't see that here, the plan was explicitly to trick the RIR into giving them resources they were otherwise not entitled to. Those resources were for everybody to share, they're stealing from you and it's appropriate to prosecute for fraud.
Have you seen a list of list of all telco companies that are together AT&T which exist solely to allow AT&T to limit liability, create a separation of entities for qualify under some rules for some other entities, etc?
When MCI Worldcom filed for bankruptcy the list of the entities that it covered took a couple of pages in major newspapers.
Pull down the whole court doc, it’s pretty clear his intentions.
