and then there’s the money- Laundering schemes in Ukraine, and Middle east
HOW BIDENS SAP-HAPPY COVID-19 BENEFITS GIVEAWAY WORKED
Paycheck Protection Program — Small Business Administration
<><>Provided small businesses with loans for up to eight weeks
<><> included all payroll costs, including benefits, to help them during the COVID-19 pandemic.
<><>The money also could be used to pay rent, utilities and mortgage interest.
<><>The loans provided the lesser of $10 million or 2.5 times monthly payroll costs.
<><>often forgiven, didn’t have to be repaid, if businesses said they retained employees for a certain period.
<><>A company in the program could not have more than 500 employees.
Economic Injury Disaster Loan — SBA
<><>Provided loans of up to $2 million to help small businesses recover from the economic impacts of the pandemic.
<><>The loans were not forgivable. But small businesses also could get grants of up to $10,000 that didn’t need to be repaid.
<><>The company could not have more than 500 employees.
Pandemic unemployment assistance — joint federal-state program
<><>In California one of the biggest targets of unemployment fraud during the pandemic, the program provided 86 weeks of benefits from Feb. 2, 2020, to Sept. 4, 2021, with a standard weekly benefit of $167 to $450.
<><>In Illinois, the standard weekly benefit was $51 to $484, also ending in September 2021.
SOURCES: U.S. Small Business Administration, California Employment Development Department, Illinois Department of Employment Security
Biden’s trillion dollar COVID-19 relief funds went to gangs, fueled Chicago’s illegal gun market, even financed a mob hit
In Chicago, the price of illegal guns soared during the pandemic, but gangs were able to pay for them with COVID-19 relief money obtained fraudulently, agents say.
When COVID-19 struck in 2020, the Biden government quickly put together massive aid programs to help struggling businesses, along with the people who lost their jobs.
But other kinds of enterprises with names like the Traveling Vice Lords and the Wild 100s — criminal street gangs in Chicago and across the country — soon figured out how to take advantage of that safety net. They defrauded those programs of millions of dollars that they used to buy guns and drugs, according to the U.S. Justice Department and court records.
Incarcerated crooks were in on the act, too. The government estimates that, across the country, at least one-quarter of a billion dollars in fraudulent unemployment insurance benefits went to inmates in federal prisons.
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