From the NY Post:Us Rep. Charles Rangel's pet nonprofit, the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone, controls hundreds of millions in taxpayer cash but defiantly refuses to explain its spending.
The group's tax forms are incomplete, and it has yet to release its 2009 annual report. Questions are stonewalled.
Asked about its $2.7 million loan to the troubled Alianza Dominicana for its delayed multimillion-dollar Triangle Building headquarters, UMEZ's lawyer said it was "an internal matter."
The note came due Oct. 9, but Blair Duncan would not say whether the loan was paid -- only that the UMEZ "was working with the borrower."
The UMEZ last spring approved a separate $2.6 million grant to Alianza to finish the inside of the Triangle Building, despite the objections of one of its own financial executives. That grant is now held up pending a review by its board.
Alianza CEO Moises Perez was recently forced by the city to take an unpaid leave of absence over allegations of self-dealing and financial mismanagement of the social-services nonprofit.
The Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone has been in business since 1995 and is one of nine such zones created under legislation written by Rangel (D-Harlem). Their mission is to spur development in inner cities.
The UMEZ was funded with $249 million in federal, state and city money. The group has spent about 80 percent of it.
Among the bigger projects it has helped fund are the Harlem USA mall on 125th Street and the new East River Plaza.
A former UMEZ employee said the organization funds its friends and "friends of Charlie's," calling it "influence-peddling at its most basic level."
3 comments:
Charlie is #1 in my death pool.....
Rangle is not kinda shady - his modos operendi is he is shady!
Rangel is a first rate slimeball. He's the classic do as I say not as I do politico.
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