LOS ANGELES –The federal government and other prosecutors continue to recover funds from people who illegally applied for and received money from the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP).
Despite the successes, some analysts have suggested hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of ill-gotten PPP funds remain outstanding.
The latest person to be found guilty is a Riverside County, Calif. man, Oumar Sissoko, 59, who purported to own a pothole-repair company was found guilty by a federal jury of fraud charges for using hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) for personal expenses, such as luxury cars, after he obtained a PPP loan for more than $7 million on behalf of his business, the U.S. Department of Justice reported.
Sissoko was found guilty of four counts of wire fraud, the Department of Justice stated.
According to evidence presented at his three-day trial, Sissoko obtained a $7.25 million loan for his downtown Los Angeles-based company, Road Doctor California LLC, after submitting a PPP loan application in April 2020.
Claimed to be Hiring 450 People
In the loan application, Sissoko claimed that Road Doctor was in the process of hiring 450 full-time employees and would have average monthly payroll expenses of $2.9 million. When he applied for the loan, Sissoko acknowledged the funds would be used to retain workers and maintain payroll, or make mortgage interest payments, lease payments and utility payments, the DoJ said.
In the days after the PPP loan was funded on May 1, 2020, Sissoko misappropriated hundreds of thousands of dollars of the loan proceeds to use for impermissible purposes, including purchasing a Mercedes-Benz for $113,000, paying off a loan on a BMW, and buying an Apple computer for more than $5,000, DoJ stated.
Other Illegal Uses
The DoJ said other illegal uses of the loan included a non-refundable down payment of approximately $100,000 to purchase a company located in New Hampshire and the attempted transmission of approximately $150,000 to accounts in the African nation of Mauritania associated with a mineral-exploration company for which Sissoko purported to serve as CEO.
United States District Judge John F. Walter has scheduled a July 18 sentencing hearing, at which time Sissoko will face a statutory maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison for each of the four wire fraud counts, the DoJ said.
Last month, a federal jury deadlocked on the charges against Sissoko and a mistrial was declared. The second trial resulted in the latest verdict.
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