A man was arrested and charged with fraudulently seeking more than $ 8 million in Salaries Protection Program loans.
A Los Angeles man was arrested and charged with fraudulently obtaining more than $ 8 million in loans from the Salary Protection Program (Paycheck Protection Program, PPP for its acronym in English).
Andrew Marnell, The 40-year-old was arrested Thursday and charged in Los Angeles federal court with a criminal complaint, revealed after his arrest, for bank fraud, according to the Justice Department.
The complaint alleges that Marnell obtained $ 8.5 million in PPP loans, through requests to insured financial institutions, on behalf of different companies.
According to prosecutors, Marnell filed fraudulent loan applications for those companies and made numerous false and misleading statements on the commercial operations and the respective payroll expenses of the businesses.
Marnell allegedly filed false and altered documents, including bogus federal tax documents and employee payroll records.
Federal prosecutors contend that loan applications were made using false and fraudulent identifications, they were aliases for Marnell.
Marnell then transferred the fraudulently obtained loan proceeds to his brokerage account, to make risky bets on the stock market, and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on loans obtained at a Las Vegas casino, prosecutors allege.
The PPP allows small businesses and other organizations to qualify receive loans with a maturity of two years and an interest rate of 1%.
Businesses must use the proceeds of the PPP loan to payroll costs, interest on mortgages, rentals and utilities.
The program allows interest and principal to be forgiven If companies spend the income from these expenses within a set period of time and use at least a certain percentage of the loan for payroll expenses.
