indago
01-15-2016, 11:23 AM
Journalist Curt Anderson wrote for The Associated Press 15 January 2016:
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Lily Zhong came to town, plunked down $500,000 for vacant land and promised to finally build a real downtown.
She produced renderings, showing modern, multistory buildings rising along wide, pedestrian-friendly streets, where people would shop, do business, dine out and attend special events, said Gregory Oravec, mayor of the city of 174,000. Home to thousands of retirees, Port St. Lucie sorely needed a gathering spot to bind the community, he said.
"The big idea was to create a sense of place, to put a 'there' there," he said.
But instead of building that downtown, federal authorities say Zhong hoodwinked officials as part of an elaborate scheme to defraud investors using a special visa program that allows wealthy foreigners to become permanent U.S. residents by financing job-creating projects. Zhong raised at least $8.5 million from Chinese investors through the U.S. EB-5 visa program and improperly used some of it on personal expenses such as luxury cars, a home and a boat...
...The case is one of several around the country in which the EB-5 program, which has been around since the early 1990s, was allegedly used to defraud hundreds of investors out of tens of millions of dollars from San Francisco to Chicago by dangling a chance at U.S. residency...
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article (http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_VISA_FRAUD_INVESTORS?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2016-01-15-04-44-03)
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Lily Zhong came to town, plunked down $500,000 for vacant land and promised to finally build a real downtown.
She produced renderings, showing modern, multistory buildings rising along wide, pedestrian-friendly streets, where people would shop, do business, dine out and attend special events, said Gregory Oravec, mayor of the city of 174,000. Home to thousands of retirees, Port St. Lucie sorely needed a gathering spot to bind the community, he said.
"The big idea was to create a sense of place, to put a 'there' there," he said.
But instead of building that downtown, federal authorities say Zhong hoodwinked officials as part of an elaborate scheme to defraud investors using a special visa program that allows wealthy foreigners to become permanent U.S. residents by financing job-creating projects. Zhong raised at least $8.5 million from Chinese investors through the U.S. EB-5 visa program and improperly used some of it on personal expenses such as luxury cars, a home and a boat...
...The case is one of several around the country in which the EB-5 program, which has been around since the early 1990s, was allegedly used to defraud hundreds of investors out of tens of millions of dollars from San Francisco to Chicago by dangling a chance at U.S. residency...
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article (http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_VISA_FRAUD_INVESTORS?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2016-01-15-04-44-03)