Subcontractor accused of fraud in I-287 project
A Long Island subcontractor is accused of defrauding a federal program for disadvantaged business enterprises when supplying steel to the costly Cross-Westchester Expressway construction project two years ago.
Yona Jimenez, president and owner of Global Marine Construction Supply (GMCS) in Roslyn, was indicted Oct. 6 on a charge of mail fraud by a federal grand jury for the Southern District of New York. She faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
GMCS was registered as a disadvantaged business enterprise, or DBE, with the U.S. Department of Transportation, which required the general contractor on the I-287 project, Yonkers Contracting Corp., to award 10 percent of the construction project work to DBEs. Yonkers Contracting is not named in the indictment.
U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, when announcing the indictment, said Jimenez billed the general contractor for $6,034,750 of structural steel her company supplied from June 2006 through October 2009. GMSC, though, was a pass-through for steel supplied by another company that was not a DBE, a violation of program regulations, according to federal prosecutors.
Yonkers Contracting claimed the full steel purchases as credit toward the project”™s DBE goal, according to the indictment. The general contractor regularly issued two checks to pay for steel deliveries: a two-party check to GMCS and an unnamed steel supplier for 99 percent of the billed cost and a separate check to GMCS for about 1 percent of the billing.
Jimenez, in a published report after her indictment, denied the fraud charge and said the two-check system was a common practice in construction.
 Chase Private Client office opens in Larchmont
JPMorgan Chase & Co. has opened its first standalone Chase Private Client office in Larchmont. The office at 124 Chatsworth Ave. is across the street from the local Chase bank branch.
Wealthy family and individual clients are served by a team that includes a Chase private client banker and a JPMorgan private client adviser. Clients also have access to a dedicated around-the-clock service hotline.
Barry Sommers, CEO of Chase Wealth Management, in a press release called the Chase Private Client business “a recognition and response to the evolving needs of our affluent Chase customers.”
A company spokeswoman said Chase will have 14 Chase Private Client locations in Westchester by the end of this year and expects to open three more private offices in the county by the end of 2012.
In a nationwide expansion in affluent communities, Chase Private Client plans to operate in more than 250 locations by the end of this year and expects to have nearly 1,000 offices by 2013.
