A prominent Democratic party fund-raiser for Barack Obama andHillary Rodham Clinton was arrested in Manhattan on Tuesday and accused of lying about his assets to obtain a $74 million loan from Citibank, the United States Attorney’s office said.
The fund-raiser, Hassan Nemazee, 59, had been a national finance chairman for Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign before raising more than $500,000 for Mr. Obama’s campaign after theDemocratic National Convention last August.
F.B.I. investigators found that Mr. Nemazee, a Park Avenue financier and the chairman of Nemazee Capital Corporation, had claimed his assets were worth hundreds of millions of dollars, according to the complaint. In order to secure the loan, Mr. Nemazee submitted fraudulent documents about his holdings to Citibank, offering information for accounts that “never existed or had been closed years before,” Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement.
Mr. Nemazee was due in court on Tuesday afternoon, where he was to be formally charged with bank fraud. The charge carries a maximum prison term of 30 years and a maximum fine of $1 million.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/26/nyregion/26fraud.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss
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