Larry Newmeister
Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) — A Chinese man was sentenced April 21 to more than four years in prison after admitting he fraudulently attempted to obtain $20 million in federal coronavirus relief funds to bail out struggling businesses .
U.S. District Judge Richard M. Berman sentenced Muge Ma to four years and four months in prison at a sentencing hearing in Manhattan.
The judge said the incarceration was necessary because of the gravity of the crime and the need to warn others against abusing government programs designed to help people in a national emergency.
Jack Ma, 38, who was arrested by federal authorities in May 2020, said he had applied to at least five banks to try to secure more than $20 million in government-guaranteed loans from the Paycheck Protection Program and Economic Injury Disaster Loan Program. Both programs are designed for businesses hurt by the coronavirus shutdown.
Authorities say he lied about paying hundreds of millions of dollars in wages to hundreds of millions of employees through two companies he controlled. In support of the claims, he submitted fraudulent banking, tax, insurance and payroll records and provided the bank with links to websites that described the companies as “global,” prosecutors said.
In fact, they said, Jack Ma was working alone in his $1.5 million Manhattan apartment at the time, falsely claiming that one of his companies represented New York state and was helping the then-governor. Andrew Cuomo procuring COVID-19 test kits and personal protective equipment for frontline workers.
Ma, a legal permanent resident who has been jailed since his arrest in May 2020, has repeatedly apologized before his sentencing. He came to the United States in 2011 on a student visa.
“I love America,” Ma said. “I’m very, very sorry to my country America.”
In addition to condemning the prison conditions of the past two years as “dirty, harsh and extremely cruel”, he has repeatedly apologized for his crimes, saying: “I hate myself so much.”
The self-criticism reached such a level that Berman interrupted Ma, telling him, “Mr. Mom, I don’t doubt how upset you are.”
“I’m not asking you to bleed,” the judge said, before he urged Ma to stop dwelling on his crimes and focus on how he could succeed in the future.
Ma’s fraud persuaded a bank to approve and disburse more than $800,000 in loan funds for one of Ma’s companies, prosecutors said, even though the money was frozen during the investigation. They said they had approved another $650,000 loan and provided a $10,000 loan advance.
U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a release that Ma committed the crime within days of Congress authorizing billions of dollars to help small businesses affected by the pandemic.
“Muge Ma saw this as an opportunity to enrich herself by applying for millions of dollars in funding to pay hundreds of employees who never existed,” Williams said.
