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"A real estate developer in Stamford was sentenced to 3 ½ years in prison Tuesday for stealing nearly $2 million in emergency COVID relief loans and spending tens of thousands of dollars on pricey automobiles and rent on his luxury apartment. Moustapha Diakhate, a 47-year old native of Senegal, filed phony applications in an attempt to defraud the government of more than $4 million in forgivable small business loans through the pandemic Paycheck Protection Program, but a collection of banks disbursing money on the government’s behalf were able to claw back all but about $1.6 million, federal prosecutors said. Diakhate, whose lawyer said he is the son of a prominent government officer in Senegal, also was ordered in Hartford by U.S. District Judge Michael Shea to repay about $1.7 million. Diakhate once tried to redevelop an old mill in Ansonia, but the project failed in 2017 when he defaulted on a loan. Federal prosecutors said in court filings that Diakhate used several partnerships in multiple applications to the U.S. Small Business Administration for loans authorized by the CARES Act to help businesses and their employees affected by pandemic business dislocations. “Instead, through what the defense acknowledges was simple greed, he made repeated efforts to steal and literally did steal from banks far more than he would have been able to get through conventional bank robbery,” prosecutors said in a court filing. Diakhate used some of the money to pay off the loan on a Porsche and buy two German sedans. He also bought a $50,000 certificate of deposit with PPP funds. He was accused of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on himself and disbursing  it to people and entities  with  relationship to his business interests. Diakhate’s lawyer said he “worked his way up through a series of menial jobs to ownership and management of real estate companies. As this Court has noted of similar success stories in other sentencings, Mr. Diakhate realized the American Dream of self-sufficiency through hard work and determination to succeed.”"
<https://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-news-moustapha-diakhate-ppp-4-million-covid-relief-fraud-20220816-20220816-kl3iww26qvcdvht5gnogvf3oky-story.html>