Democratic Party Fundraiser Sought to Defraud Bank To Repay Fraudulent Loan

The hits keep on coming for Hassan Nemazee, the Democratic party fundraiser who was arrested last week on attempting to defraud Citibank out of $74 million. He's now being implicated in a scheme to defraud another bank in order to raise the funds necessary to repay the fraudulent Citibank loan.

In a letter filed this week in Federal District Court in Manhattan, prosecutors said that Mr. Nemazee borrowed the money to repay Citibank from another bank, using a similar scheme that involved fake documents and forged signatures.

On top of that, they said, Mr. Nemazee defrauded a third bank using “similar false and fraudulent information.” In that case, they said, the outstanding loans to Mr. Nemazee totaled more than $100 million.

In the letter, the United States attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York did not identify the two other banks that it said were defrauded, and no new charges have been filed.

Mr. Nemazee, 59, a New York investor, has been a major player in Democratic fund-raising circles, with ties to President Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. He was one of several national finance chairmen for Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, and was a prodigious fund-raiser for her. And the Obama campaign credited him with raising more than $500,000 on its behalf.

In accusing him of lying about his assets to obtain the Citibank loan, prosecutors said he used fake documents to show he had collateral worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Mr. Nemazee has not entered a plea to the sole charge against him, bank fraud, and his lawyer, Marc L. Mukasey, had no comment on the new allegations. Mr. Nemazee was released on $25 million bond and ordered to be confined to his apartment and subjected to electronic monitoring.