How fraud companies cash in on truckers in the USA

Utah residents have been sentenced to jail for the well planned scheme with salaries and bribing of truckers.

According to the US Department of Justice, Hubert Ivan Ugarte, 52, and Lisa Bradshaw Rowberry, 49, are convicted of illegally obtaining a PPP loan for Frisbu Trucking, Incorporated, where both worked.

Ugarte was sentenced to 36 months in federal prison, together with a previous sentence involving bribery of FedEx Ground Hub officials in Utah.
Ugarte is the owner of several transport companies, including Frisbu Trucking. Investigators say that Ugarte hired Rowberry after she was fired from her position as an Vice President Assistant of a US bank for her involvement in financial fraud with Ugarte.

After Ugarte was indicted for bribery by FedEx, his trucking companies faced financial difficulties. To keep the company afloat, Ugarte and Rowbury received a $ 210 000 loan from PPP’s Paycheck Protection Program, but the bribery indictment wasn`t exposed.

Earlier this year, Ugarte pleaded guilty to fraud and bribery. The scheme supposedly afforded Ugarte’s trucking companies profit in $ 24 million from 2012 till 2019.

What the prosecutor’s office writes about this:

“In order to carry out the scheme, Ugarte and the FXG manager worked to obscure the ownership of Ugarte’s many trucking companies by filing false compliance reports with FXG in order to award Ugarte with more trucking routes than one business owner was entitled to under established FXG policies. As a result, Ugarte was allowed to operate at least 45 trucking routes originating from the Salt Lake FXG hub, greatly exceeding the FXG limit of only 15 trucks for the Salt Lake City hub. This practice, known as “over scaling” in the contract shipping industry, along with the payment of bribes to the FXG manager, would have resulted in the automatic termination of Ugarte’s contracts if discovered by authorities at FXG. Throughout the scheme, Ugarte’s companies received approximately $135,000,000 in gross payments from FXG, resulting in net profits to his trucking companies of approximately $24,000,000.“