Русская служба Би-Би-Си: Семейный подряд в мошенничестве с американской ипотекой
Vladimir Kozlovsky, November 16, 2011
Mortgage Fraud Cost American Banks Millions of Dollars
For the past year and a half, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of California and the Internal Revenue Service have been investigating a series of mortgage loan scams that occurred in 2006 and 2007 in and around California’s capital, Sacramento.
To date, three criminal cases have been filed in connection with the probe, involving a total of 25 individuals.
Prosecutors say the investigation is far from over and predict additional criminal charges with new defendants.
Church Connections
Many of those implicated are close relatives or became acquainted through family ties to the Bethany Slavic Missionary Church, the largest Pentecostal congregation in the region, with 3,000 members.
Local media have mentioned 40‑year‑old Pyotr Bondaruk, charged in one of these cases; his father, Adam Bondaruk, was one of the founders and the head pastor of Bethany.
Vera Kuzmenko, 41, who emigrated to the United States from Estonia in 1988 and obtained refugee status, told the Sacramento Bee that her uncle was a deacon in the church and her father worked in the church’s funeral ministry.
A church representative told the newspaper last week that none of the accused belong to its congregation.
All deny guilt. Some contacted the Sacramento Bee and claimed the authorities are targeting them because of their ethnicity.
“If you take a poll, you’ll see: many believe this is directed against the Russian community,” 32‑year‑old defendant Vera Zhiry told the newspaper.
The investigation has also stirred anxiety in Sacramento’s Armenian community.
In March, investigators questioned Vanik Atoyan, whom they consider an accomplice of Vera Kuzmenko, as well as Kristina Atoyan, Marat Galoyan, Zhora Darmoyan, Akop Darmoyan and Aram Paskevichyan.
Afterward, an attorney representing three of those individuals called an FBI investigator and told him that these investigative steps had “struck fear into the Armenian community.”
A Family Affair
The aforementioned Bondaruk is described as the boyfriend of Zhiry, and the 41‑year‑old defendant Olga Palamarchuk is Zhiry’s aunt.
Vera Kuzmenko was indicted together with her husband Eduard Shevtsov, sister Nadezhda, and brother Pyotr.
According to investigators, after learning of the investigation, Vera planned to fly to Kyiv in May with another brother, Vladimir, who is not charged. Unlike her brother, she allegedly had no intention of returning to the U.S. The trip was derailed by her arrest.
Most of those implicated are charged with fraud, but some also face counts of money laundering and obstruction of justice.
Vera Kuzmenko, who was convicted of fraud in 1994, is accused above all of obstructing the investigation. She allegedly advised other participants to retroactively blame everything on her acquaintance Miroslava Chekina, who was killed in Ukraine on June 1 of last year.
According to prosecutors, the defendants allegedly recruited straw buyers for real estate and fraudulently inflated their incomes so that mortgage companies would extend loans to them to purchase homes. The defendants also allegedly inflated the price of the properties sold by submitting fake invoices for repair work that was never performed.
Among other things, the scheme’s organizers earned commissions and pocketed part of the profit from home sales.
Prosecutors say sellers typically raised no objection: home prices continued to plummet, and they were happy to get rid of the properties just to stop paying the mortgage.
Roughly six months later, the buyer would stop making loan payments, and after some time the lender would foreclose on the house. Because its price had been grossly inflated, the lender’s subsequent sale of the home did not cover the amount of the loan it had previously extended to the straw buyer.
For example, in January 2005, Vera Kuzmenko and her husband Shevtsov bought a house for $820,000. After payments ceased, the bank that had provided the purchase loan took possession of the house but was able to sell it for only $425,000. The lender’s loss amounted to $225,000.
Court documents identify the mastermind of the scheme as Vera Kuzmenko, owner of a tax‑preparation business and holder of a real‑estate license. Most straw buyers reportedly were clients of her firm, which was described as Sacramento’s “Russian community club.”
In total, the defendants are accused of schemes involving the purchase of 20 homes, as a result of which mortgage companies suffered losses exceeding $9 million.
Criminal Details
One court document is almost entirely devoted to describing how a man named Andrey Andreev bought a house worth $850,000 in 2007. He was not required to make any down payment, and the mortgage company First Franklin Financial, which provided the lion’s share of the loans in the case, gave him a loan for the full amount.
To obtain it, Andreev sharply inflated his income, stating that his salary was $22,420 a month and that he also rented out his house in the California town of Antelope for $3,120 a month. In addition, he assured the lender that he had $45,000 in his checking account.
The investigation, however, established that Andreev worked as a carpenter and earned $2,539 a month, and that he did not even have a checking account at the bank he named.
Initially, Andreev told investigators that Miroslava Chekina had handled the purchase of the property and that she had obviously provided the lender with false information. Three days later, FBI agents showed up again and presented Andreev with copies of e‑mail correspondence showing that no one had heard of Chekina and that the transaction had been orchestrated exclusively by Vera Kuzmenko.
This time Andreev admitted that he had never seen Chekina in his life, and that it was Kuzmenko who told him to pin everything on her. He testified that when she was filling out his tax return, Kuzmenko asked if he wanted to purchase a house. Andreev replied that he had no money.
In response, he was told that Kuzmenko would take all the trouble upon herself, submit the paperwork for him, and he would get a loan. She asked what Andreev wanted in return. “A new pickup truck,” he said, and subsequently received $22,500 for that purchase.
Andreev has not been charged. According to prosecutors, Kuzmenko faces up to 10 years in prison.
Her lawyer says she is not guilty of anything, and explains what happened as due to upheavals in the real estate market.
BBC Resources
BBC © 2011
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