Dirty Laundry of US Capitol

mickeyratmickeyrat up my ass, like Chadwick was up his Posts: 35,410
Irrespective of party,  shady shit occurs around that building. Hadnt a thread on this yet so lets start with this.....

Treasury, SBA data show small-business loans went to private-equity backed chains, members of Congress
By Jonathan O'Connell, Aaron Gregg, Steven Rich, Anu Narayanswamy and Peter Whoriskey

Data released Monday by the Small Business Administration shows that businesses owned by members of Congress and the law practice that represented President Trump were among the hundreds of thousands of firms that received aid from the agency.

As part of its $660 billion small-business relief program, the SBA also handed out loans to private schools catering to elite clientele, firms owned by foreign companies and large chains backed by well-heeled Wall Street firms. Nearly 90,000 companies in the program took the aid without promising on their applications they would rehire workers or create jobs.

The data, which was released after weeks of pressure from media outlets and lawmakers, paints a picture of a haphazard first-come, first-served program that was not designed to evaluate the relative need of the recipients. While it buttressed a swath of industries and entities, including restaurants, medical offices, car dealerships, law firms and nonprofits, the agency did not filter out companies that have potential conflicts of interest among influential Washington figures.
Several major chains who have private-equity investors, including PF Chang’s and Silver Diner, received millions of dollars, which may rekindle questions about whether large companies with Wall Street connections should accept the money or not. Over the past weeks, dozens of publicly traded companies returned money after they were told by the Treasury Department that the program was not meant for large, well-capitalized companies.

Companies applying for the money were required to certify that the money was “necessary to support the ongoing operations,” while taking into account “their ability to access other sources of liquidity,” the SBA’s website states.

Treasury and SBA spokespeople declined to comment. Other administration officials declined to speak on the record about the data.

“We think we’ve done a reasonably good job of suggesting that those who were not going to be able to meet the certification should have returned money,” said one senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity in accordance with the administration’s rules for releasing the information.

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Among some of those receiving relief were Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao’s family’s shipping business. In addition, at least seven members of Congress or their spouses received loans, including lawmakers who were directly involved in shaping regulations and also benefited from a blanket waiver of ethics concerns.

Among the loan recipients disclosed is KTAK Corp., a Tulsa-based operator of fast food franchises owned by Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.). Hern had advocated increasing the size of loans available to franchisees, including in a March letter to Senate leaders Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.).

KTAK reported receiving between $1 million and $2 million to support 220 jobs. Hern spokeswoman Miranda Dabney said the letter was “a bipartisan idea meant to simplify the way loans were calculated,” and said the franchise rule that Hern advocated did not benefit KTAK because it employs fewer than 500 people.

“These PPP loans are all about paying employees so any expansion or increased funding measures were aimed at helping employees of franchisees stay employed,” Dabney said. “The whole program was designed to keep people off of unemployment.”

Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.) benefited when three of his car dealerships, located outside of Pittsburgh, received a combined total of between $450,000 and $1.05 million to retain 97 jobs, according to the data.

Kelly is not involved in the day-to-day operations of his auto dealerships, said spokesman Andrew Eisenberger, and did not participate in discussions between the dealerships and the PPP lender.

“Kelly’s small family business employs more than 200 Western Pennsylvanians whose jobs were at risk because of [Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf’s] business shutdown order,” Eisenberger said.

Several plumbing businesses affiliated with Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.), all based in Broken Arrow, Okla., each received between $350,000 and $1 million. A spokeswoman said Rep. Mullin is not involved in the day-to-day operation of his businesses.

[Explore the SBA data on businesses that received PPP loans]

Craig Holman, an advocate from the watchdog group Public Citizen, said policymakers involved in shaping the program should not be allowed to profit off taxpayer-backed loans.

“If they have some sort of influence over how the money gets awarded, or how much money gets awarded, they should not be the recipients of those funds,” Holman said. “If they are the recipients of their own cash that they’re handing out, it really raises questions of self-dealing.”

Steve Ellis, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, said a line should be drawn with policymakers who are directly involved in charting the path of federal funds.

“You can write the policy to be blind to the nature of the entities, but certainly if you are involved in drafting it, or modifying it to benefit certain businesses, that’s where the alarm bells should be raised,” said Ellis.

The lawyer who represented Trump in the Mueller investigation, as well as dozens of tenants of Trump’s real estate company, also received money, the latest in a series of instances in which Trump’s company and his government have overlapped.

At 40 Wall Street, an office building Trump owns in Lower Manhattan, 22 companies received loans, for a combined total of at least $16.6 million. The recipients included the pro-Israel group Hadassah, the Girl Scout Council of Greater New York and the engineering and consulting firm Atane, according to the data.

Triomphe Restaurant Corp, which operates the Jean-Georges restaurant at the Trump International Hotel on Central Park West, got between $2 million and $5 million. Sushi Nakazawa, a restaurant in the Trump D.C. hotel, received between $150,000 and $350,000 to support 22 jobs, according to the data.

Another politically connected loan recipient was New York law firm Kasowitz, Benson & Torres, headed by longtime Trump attorney Marc Kasowitz, which received between $5 million and $10 million in PPP funds to support about 400 employees.

No one from the firm had any contact with anyone in the Trump administration about the PPP loan, said spokeswoman Emily Thall. She said the loan was coordinated through the bank without the partners’ involvement and along with other cost-saving measures “enabled us to preserve the jobs of our hundreds of employees at full salary and benefits without interruption.”


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