-->

Saturday, May 18, 2019

Now we're getting into the Harry Potter character names

The essence of the FNBC scandal is about the way New Orleans's social and political elites leverage their status to launder various government grants, tax incentives, and charitable donations through non-profit entities, real estate transactions, and public-private  partnerships in order to pass money around among themselves and their friends. We are governed by a syndicate of wealthy criminals. During the critical post-Katrina "recovery" period, FNBC was their bank of choice.

The collapse of the bank exposes a lot of these people. Here is one whose actual name, believe it or not, is Charity.
Charity is the third person to be charged in the case, in which the bank, founded by high-profile New Orleans financier Ashton Ryan, was seized by regulators in the spring of 2017, leaving the Federal Deposit Insurance Fund on the hook for $1 billion. It was the biggest U.S. bank failure since the 2008-2010 financial crisis.

The charges brought Friday allege that Charity used front companies and conspired with "Bank President A" -- which, it is clear from previous charges brought in the case, is Ryan -- to submit false documents to obtain loans that totaled $18 million by the time the bank collapsed in April 2017.
Actually I remember this guy. One of the scams he was involved in had to do with Mitch Landrieu's use of "Fresh Food Retailer" grants ostensibly aimed at alleviating so called "food deserts" but in reality became a conduit for funneling money to corporate entities like Whole Foods or to hustlers like this Charity person. The Advocate links back to a Lens article about Charity and Landrieu's FFRI scam but apparently doesn't read it since they seem to think the strip mall in question is located in New Orleans East. [UPDATE: Turns out the US Attorney's office doesn't know where the mall is]

Or maybe they don't want to implicate any of the Landrieu people until they have to. And that's the interesting thing about this story. The FNBC failure could turn over a lot of rocks. But it's also likely the media is interested in looking under as few of those as possible.

No comments: