(TNS) – A suspicious online university whose program appears to be copied and glued from a European school, two corporations with almost Internet sites, and two others with virtually no Internet presence: those five corporations are connected to Texas itself.
And all five earned loans from the Payment Check Protection Program totaling at least $3. 65 million. But have they?
These corporations are among more than 75 corporations that have obtained loans of at least $150,000 from the small business coronavirus relief program, but do not appear to have existed until this spring or have met other eligibility criteria for the program, which was administered throughout the United States. Small Business Administration States. Altogether, non-performing loans, which are publicly declared as a diversity of securities that, as an express amount, totaled between $20 million and $50 million.
No state produced more corporations reported in the investigation than Florida, which accounted for more than one in 4 corporations corresponding to the model. Dubious loans were reported in a joint investigation conducted through the Miami Herald/McClatchy and Anti-Corruption Data Collective. a non-profit organization of hounds and knowledge scientists corruption. Several corporations have owners with complicated monetary records, some of whom have incurred several private bankruptcies and others have been convicted of fraud.
Former federal agents and prosecutors who spoke to the Herald/McClatchy expressed fear about the effects and laxity of fraud controls on the program.
“It’s troubling at all levels,” said Ben Curtis, a spouse at McDermott’s Miami Will
Prosecutors have charged more than 20 corporations for fraud under the CARES Act, which legalizes the loan program, and a recent report through the House Oversight Committee warned that there may be only billions of dollars in PPP fraud. Rep. James Clyburn, a Democrat from South Carolina, asked the inspectors general of the U. S. Treasury Department and the SBA to investigate the program.
Experts say the duration and speed of coronavirus relief systems, such as the payment check coverage program, have made them vulnerable.
“This will be the biggest fraud in government history, the scope of which we may not know for many years,” said Vic Hartman, a former FBI agent and a 2019 e-book on class-based fraud in his career. .
PPP was designed to help existing companies stay afloat – and remain payroll workers – during the pandemic crisis. I did not intend to provide initial capital for new companies. Under program rules, corporations were to be “operational in February. On February 15, 2020,” however, control of potential borrowers was left to the banks that issued the loans. In turn, they were only asked to accept the word from borrowers to get the maximum of the required information.
Loan amounts, for example, were based on a company’s self-formed payroll knowledge over the past year, with the maximum amount of loans at a cap of $10 million. they are used for payroll and other approved expenses within 24 weeks of the award and can be reimbursed by borrowers if they submit their documents on time.
The research was consistent with public knowledge of more than 600,000 corporations that obtained PPP loans of more than $150,000 using commercial registration knowledge from the open source OpenCorporates knowledge base, which draws their knowledge from state corporation archives across the country. Newly created corporations informed in the investigation were then manually reviewed through researchers and hounds who were given the impression of potentially violating program rules.
The SBA did not disclose the names of corporations that received loans below US$150,000, and knowledge of corporate registration did not come with data for 11 states and contained incomplete data for several others, that research is most likely a significant underestimation of the actual number. . newly created companies that have earned the budget of PPP and other companies that have received loans fraudulently under the program.
The SBA provided a report to the Herald and refused to answer detailed questions about the effects and corporations reported on the analysis.
“The SBA does not comment on individual borrowers. Evidence of waste, fraud and abuse with one of the SBA’s lending systems is not tolerated and reported . . . The SBA effectively distributed $5. 21 million in loans and $525 billion to small businesses in an unprecedented amount of time, through Paycheck’s repayment program,” the SBA said, distorting the call of Paycheck’s coverage program.
Two newly created Florida corporations that have received PPP loans have virtually no footprint, physical or virtual, but appear to be similar to the same Florida family. Buccaneer Technologies earned a PPP loan of $350,000 to $1 million on May 11, 3 days after the company registered with the Florida Secretary of State. Sonata Technologies, for its part, approved a PPP loan of between $1 million and $2 million on May 26, 8 days after the company registered in the state.
Buccaneer Technologies, which he said was an advertising agency, indexed a virtual workplace in Miami as a commercial solution, while Sonata Technologies indexed a virtual workplace in Aventura, Florida, as a commercial solution. Apopka, Florida, for its executive members. Emmet Bowens is indexed as CEO of Buccaneer Technologies, while Equansha Bowens is indexed as Director of Sonata Technologies. Property records show that Emmet Bowens is the owner of the Apopka house. The dating between Emmet and Equansha is unclear.
Emmet Bowens faced two lawsuits in 2019 after defaulting on a 2019 Ford F-150 and a used 2015 Mercedes C-Class. The search for the F-150 is ongoing, while the lawsuit against the Mercedes was voluntarily brazen in early August. a few months after the approval of the PPP loan.
Bowens and his wife, Taquanda, were also in a lawsuit filed through a loan company for the fact that the couple owes more than $190,000 to the previous owner’s default loan and to Apopka’s home they bought on a foreclosure in 2017. .
In 2011, Emmet Bowens, under the call of Emmitt Pascal Bowens, he filed for bankruptcy in Tennessee, seeking to release more than $290,000 in debt, however, his bankruptcy application was rejected after being challenged through car finance company Ally because the company stated that Bowens had “transferred, kidnapped, concealed or allowed the same thing to be done” to a Chevrolet Avalanche in which he had failed to comply and the financial firm had attempted to take over court before.
Emmet and Equansha Bowens did not respond to requests for comment on related telephone numbers and email addresses or through the attorney Emmet and Taquanda hired to constitute them in the loan litigation.
Another company informed in the investigation appears to have received two PPP loans, which is prohibited by program rules.
Power1 Integrated received a loan between $150,000 and $350,000 from Itria Ventures LLC on June 29, and then issued a momentary PPP loan in the same diversity to Zions Bank the next day None of the banks responded to a request for comment and none of the loans were reported as assets.
The company registered in California on May 14, indicating as a business facing a shared workspace in Beverly Hills. and returned it to the sender.
Power1 Integrated stated in its presentation to the State that it had been constituted through Donald Walter Winston and that its agent Langford
There is a Facebook profile of Donald W. Winston, who pretends to be a tax attorney in Los Angeles, but the California Bar Association does not include any attorney with that call and the account profile picture is a photo of a “man at the helm of a book. “The Herald/McClatchy contacted an email related to a company supposedly connected to Power1 Integrated and got no response.
In Texas, a network of five corporations that earned between $3. 65 million and $8. 7 million in the PPP budget also looks suspicious.
Joseph Sinoj, the kind of Texas who connects them all, said he was a business enthusiast, but not the real beneficiary.
The s of two of the companies, MK Analytics and Sanbi Solutions, were necessarily the same as those of SanJose Systems, a Texas generation company that includes Sinoj as its CEO. SanJose Systems did not obtain a PPP loan.
When asked about the similarities, Sinoj replied that it could be outdated.
“Not all websites would be as up-to-date as possible,” he said.
After the Herald/McClatchy contacted Sinoj, MK Analytics and Sanbi Solutions s were changed. MK Analytics recently declared “Planned Maintenance in Progress”.
Sunny Matthew, vice president of business intelligence at Sanbi Solutions, said Sanbi’s online page is outdated.
He stated that the company, “largely concerned about business resource planning, ERP system integrations, functionality control responses, and Business Intelligence responses,” had been in lifestyles for about two years and that its relationship with MK Analytics was through the provider. category. “
The three sites in the past promoted a signed contract through SanJose Systems with the Texas Department of Information Resources.
The contract uploaded SanJose Systems to the state’s list of favorite suppliers, but state records show that the company’s only consumer, a nonprofit university, AnnJose University, registered in Texas through a guy named Joseph Varghese who also registered SanJose Systems.
Sinoj refused to answer questions about AnnJose University and her purchases from SanJose Systems, saying she planned to attend a meeting.
AnnJose University’s online page lists a shared area in New Orleans as the physical front of the online university, which does not appear to be accredited, is not licensed or registered with the state of Louisiana and has been granted a devoted exemption from surveillance across the state of Texas university claims to offer degrees in theology, however much of the site’s content appears to be a copy of Domuni Universitas, an online theological university founded in France, which has no connection to AnnJose. The page even includes a reference to Domuni Universitas.
“It’s a cheeky copy,” said Carly Wood, director of Domuni’s English department.
He said the European online university, which has about 3,000 students, was not aware of AnnJose’s online page until it was contacted through a Herald/McClatchy reporter. He said the university is taking steps to remove AnnJose’s site.
“You’re wondering what the intentions are, ” said Wood. “Are you going to make effective with that?”
AnnJose University won an APP loan worth between $150,000 and $350,000 on May 10, indicating that it offers environmental advisory services.
The other companies, all of which borrowed in June, indicated that they provided custom-designed computer programming services.
Three of the 4 companies, MK Analytics, Sanbi Solutions and KMS Traders Group LLC, received loans through Radius Bank, while KJ Traders and Consultants LLC received a loan through Celtic Bank.
The 4 software corporations have indexed Wyoming addresses and corporations have registered there in recent months. MK Analytics, Sanbi Solutions and KJ Traders and Consultants registered in May, weeks before PPP loans were received and months after the February 15, 2020 deadline. KMS Traders Group, which won the largest PPP loan in any business, between $2 million and $5 million, was registered six days after the loan granted and the company said the loan would save 97 jobs.
In reaction to a list of questions sent to Sinoj, Mani Kandathil, the leading chief operating officer of KMS Traders Group, said the company’s data to the SBA was accurate and that, despite the July registration in Wyoming, the company had been in operation since December. 2018.
“Wyoming registration documents show the classification of the entity followed by an update to the company’s operating contract and its date,” Kandathil said in an email. “The company was running on February 15, 2020 and the business began in December 2018. “
Kandathil refused to say where the company operated this period.
The company’s online page was registered on August 25, 2020, based on Internet registration data, and appears to have been brought online after Herald/McClatchy began asking questions about the company.
(After the publication, Nidhila K, representative of KJ Traders and Consultants, approached to say that the company had in fact not won a PPP loan, despite reports to the contrary. “Society has no idea who this mess is. The company has not won any PPP loans from the SBA. »)
Despite these examples, experts in which most of the PPP’s cash went to companies that deserve it and that stayed afloat with the funds.
“Most companies are valid and have benefited from the program as intended to obtain from it. But there are rotten apples,” said Jeffrey Scheer, Bond’s business lawyer Schoeneck and King.
And although we later decided that some of the cash was paid to ineligible borrowers, it’s not necessarily a flaw in program design.
Hartman, the former FBI agent, said he suspected that the program’s architects probably understood that some degree of fraud would be inevitable with immediate deployment, but that they could recover some of the cash received fraudulently after his release.
“It’s pay and hunt,” Hartman said. You pay and then sue all the scammers. “
Other fraud experts say that the amount of cash received through ineligible borrowers can simply be valued in the broader calculation of the economic recovery.
“It sounds like an anti-fraud saying that, but that doesn’t mean the program was misdirected,” said John Warren, general suggestion from the Certified Fraud Examiners Association. “I’m sure thousands of companies have been stored as a result of this. “
© 2020 McClatchy Office in Washington. Distributed through Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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