NEW YORK, Sept 10: A 56-year-old Indian-American businessman here has been arrested and indicted on fraud charges and faces a minimum of 30 years in prison for his long-running fraud scheme involving millions of dollars.
Harendra Singh was charged yesterday in a 13-count indictment with multiple counts of services wire fraud, federal program bribery, disaster relief fraud, conspiring to defraud the US and tampering with evidence.
Singh has been arrested and was arraigned before US Magistrate Judge Kathleen Tomlinson.
He owned and operated restaurants and food concessions located primarily in Nassau County and was awarded agreements to operate various food concessions in a town in the county.
The indictment charges that Singh paid bribes and kickbacks to a city employee in exchange for his assistance in obtaining guarantee of two loans totalling about USD 20 million.
The indictment also alleges that Singh fraudulently under-reported to the Internal Revenue Service the true amount of money his entities earned and the wages he paid his workers, thereby lowering significantly the federal taxes he and his businesses owed and paid.
Specifically, for tax years 2009 and 2012, he allegedly failed to report about USD 10 million in gross receipts. To facilitate this fraud, Singh employed an individual who, at his direction, did not record his entities’ cash sales as gross receipts in the books and records of those businesses.
In addition, from 2010 through 2014, Singh allegedly concealed over USD seven million of wages paid to employees. He accomplished this scheme by paying a significant portion of the wages paid to employees of these entities “off the books.”
By under-reporting employee hours and even concealing the existence of some employees, Singh caused his payroll processing companies to underreport the employee wages.
The indictment also alleges that between October 2012 and January 2015, he fraudulently obtained disaster relief funds by preparing and filing false and fraudulent documents and invoices with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
These documents claimed that Singh’s entity ‘The Water’s Edge’, which operated a restaurant in Long Island City suffered losses following Hurricane Sandy.
The invoices inflated the amount of losses, often by double or triple the actual amount.
Singh also submitted to FEMA fraudulent receipts from vendors that inflated the value of the contents of the building that housed the restaurant.
As a result, Singh fraudulently received approximately USD 950,000 in disaster relief funds from FEMA.
Singh faces terms of imprisonment of up to 20 years for each services wire fraud charge and up to 10 years for the federal program bribery charge.
He further faces terms of imprisonment of up to 30 years for the disaster relief fraud charge and up to five years for conspiring to defraud the United States in connection with his submitted claims for disaster relief. (PTI)
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