Zionist 22 yr-old war profiteer arrested for $300 million fraud (... more Anti-Semitism?)

The 22-year-old president of a Miami Beach arms-dealing company and three other people were charged Friday with selling prohibited Chinese ammunition to the Pentagon to supply Afghan security forces, federal officials said.

A federal grand jury in Miami indicted the munitions dealer, Efraim Diveroli, president of AEY, as well as two former employees and a business associate, on charges of fraud and conspiring to misrepresent the types of ammunition they sold to the Defense Department as part of a $298 million U.S. Army contract.

According to the indictment, Diveroli, his colleagues and the company sought "to unjustly enrich themselves" by shipping aged Chinese rifle cartridges to Afghanistan after claiming they were made in Albania. The army contract and U.S. law prohibit trading in Chinese arms.

A lawyer for Diveroli in Miami, Howard Srebnick, disputed the accusations in an e-mail message, saying that the U.S. ban applied only to Chinese arms bought after 1989, in response to the crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square, and that AEY had bought ammunition from Albania that was manufactured in China in the 1960s and 1970s.

The charges cap a federal criminal investigation that began last year into the dealings of the fledgling company and its group of 20-something executives. The U.S. military relied on them to be a principal supplier of ammunition to the Afghan security forces.

In March, the U.S. Army suspended Diveroli and the company from future federal contracts, claiming he sent a different shipment of Chinese cartridges to Afghanistan after certifyin

g that they were made in Hungary. One month later, the State Department suspended the company's international export activities, blocking its other business.

"This is a sobering development," said Henry Waxman, the California Democrat who heads the Oversight and Government Reform Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives. "The more we learn about AEY, the more questions we have."

Before the charges were announced, the committee said it would conduct a hearing Tuesday on AEY's activities.

In addition to Diveroli, the indictment named David Packouz, a licensed massage therapist who is AEY's former vice president; Alexander Podrizki, the company's former representative in Albania; and Ralph Merrill, a business associate of Diveroli in Utah who gave the company financial and managerial assistance.

A lawyer for Packouz, Ken Kukec, declined to comment on the charges. Merrill did not return telephone messages, and Podrizki could not be reached for comment.

In January 2007, the U.S. Army awarded AEY a contract, potentially worth $298 million, that made it the primary munitions supplier for Afghan security forces in the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

According to the indictment, the contract required AEY to certify that it was providing "serviceable and safe ammunition." The contract also banned supplying ammunition acquired

"directly or indirectly from a Communist Chinese military company."

But the charges accuse the AEY employees and the associate of providing "instructions and guidance" on how to remove Chinese markings from the ammunition, to conceal its origins. With each shipment to Afghanistan, the charges say, Diveroli falsely certified that the Chinese rifle and machine-gun cartridges were manufactured in Albania.

The authorities said that based on these false submissions, the army had paid AEY about $10.3 million for 35 shipments of Chinese ammunition.

An examination by this newsp

aper earlier this year uncovered documents from Albania that showed that AEY bought more than 100 million Chinese cartridges that had been stored for decades in former Cold War stockpiles. Diveroli then arranged to have them repacked in cardboard boxes, many of which split or decomposed after shipment to the war zones. Different lots or types of ammunition were mixed. In some cases the ammunition was dirty, corroded or covered with a film.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/21/america/indict.php