Posted on Sunday, 08.19.12
Not a single drop of the massive British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico touched the land-locked city of Homestead or the Keys peninsula to the south.
But a Homestead businessman saw the April 2010 oil-rig explosion and subsequent environmental disaster as an opportunity to cash in, authorities say. Jean Mari Lindor filed about $15 million in BP damage claims for himself and others for wages purportedly lost due to the spill’s economic hit on the region’s tourism industry.
Lindor submitted as many as 700 suspicious claims, mostly for low-income workers who each paid him a processing fee of $300, a prosecutor said in federal court last week. As a result, Lindor and the other South Florida claimants were paid about $3 million from the Gulf Coast Claims Facility, which was established by British Petroleum after the protracted Deepwater Horizon spill.
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Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Watts-Fitzgerald said Lindor filed “fraudulent documents” as he allegedly fleeced the $20-billion compensation program set up by BP for oil-spill victims in an agreement with the Obama administration.
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In other South Florida criminal cases, offenders have been accused of stealing the identities of others to file false claims with the BP fund.
Among them: A Miami federal jury in June convicted Joseph Harvey and Anja Karin Kannell of using the “assumed identities” of hundreds of actual people living in the Florida Panhandle, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama to file fraudulent claims for millions of dollars in lost wages stemming from the spill. They collected about $700,000 in BP payments, authorities say. The Delray Beach couple faces sentencing Thursday.
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The Gulf Coast Claims Facility received about 1.1 million claims from all 50 U.S. states and 35 foreign countries, including applications from fishermen, hotels and restaurants. Overall, the GCCF approved more than one-third of those claims, totaling $6.5 billion in payouts to 226,000 claimants. The majority of applications were denied for lack of valid documentation, and a fraction for fraud.
“There’s a far cry from gaming the system and pushing the boundaries of the [claims process] to doctoring tax returns and adding zeros,” said Feinberg, who also served as the administrator for the 9/11 victims’ compensation fund and the government’s TARP bailout for banks.
Asked how some suspected criminals were able to bilk the BP fund program, he said: “You can’t catch everybody. Inevitably in a program like the GCCF, mistakes are made and certain fraudulent applications are paid.’’
Lindor’s alleged scheme was run out of his Homestead company Noula, which was infiltrated as part of an FBI undercover investigation.
According to a court affidavit, the probe started when the FBI received a tip last September that Lindor was breaking the law under the cover of his business, which “purported to provide immigration services to immigrants in the area.”
Then, the FBI obtained a “complaint report” that had been written in early 2011 by someone claiming to be associated with the Ocean Reef Club in Key Largo. The complainant’s email said that more than 20 employees were in on Lindor’s scheme, including a housekeeper who made $12,000 a year and who, after submitting “fictitious information,” received $19,000 from the BP fund.
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FBI agents, assisted by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and Secret Service, discovered that other claims for lost wages were filed through Lindor’s business by 15 employees at the Island Grill in Islamorada.
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