Monday, August 31, 2009

When will the slush puppies go down?

From Crime, Politics and Policy via Bloomberg Watch:

A quick recap: The controversy emerged with the discovery of the practice of allocating funds to a nonprofit group/entity which didn't really exist, in order to preserve the ability to reallocate such funds to a different, actually existing nonprofit entity later on.

Put into plain English: this is fraud. Doing something in order to obtain the money or goods of another, by false pretenses, generally falls under the definition of fraud. Wire fraud, mail fraud, honest services fraud, whatever. Somewhere, there is a federal felony where all the elements of said felony are satisfied by something or someone in connection with this slush fund mess. Even if the ultimate ends are benign, the undeniable implication is that candor, at the beginning, that nonprofit A was the intended destination of the funds would have resulted in the funds being denied to nonprofit A, therefore nonprofit B (for bogus) was "created" in order to procure (aka "steal") the funds for preservation and safekeeping for ultimate destination nonprofit A. Here's another word for the above: deception. There is a crime of "theft by deception" in many states.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It's utterly amazing and how cozy Highline Board Member former Speaker Gifford Miller and Mr. anti-term-limits Peter Vallone (the Speaker that started the practice)just sit back without any scrutiny whatsoever is even worse.

What does it take? They're not even denying it. Hellllllo Mr. Cuomo. Helllllo FBI.

Wow, and Thompson is apparently really good at his job, since he claims to simply have had no idea.

Disgraceful.