SALT LAKE CITY – The owner of a popular Italian restaurant has been sentenced to a year in prison for embezzling more than $1.88 million in COVID-19 relief funds.
Giuseppe Mirenda, 29, of Salt Lake City, is co-owner of Sicilia Restaurant Management and five restaurants in Utah, including the popular Sicilia Mia in Holladay. The U.S. Attorney’s Office announced Thursday that Mirenda was sentenced to one year and one day in prison for defrauding a COVID-19 relief program.
Mirenda was sentenced this week after pleading guilty in February to two counts of embezzlement of government property. His sentence includes three years’ probation and a $250,000 fine.
According to court documents, Mirenda fraudulently applied for and signed contracts for six Economic Injury Disaster Loans in 2020. Economic Injury Disaster Loans were created under the CARES Act for small businesses suffering from the pandemic.
In 2021, he applied for an additional $520,000 in Economic Injury Disaster Loans, but was denied.
Mirenda agreed in the loan applications that his loan proceeds would be used “solely as working capital to mitigate the economic damage caused by the pandemic,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office said Thursday. However, Mirenda used the loan money for his personal benefit and misrepresented the citizenship status of his co-owners to improperly obtain the loans, court documents say.
Mirenda illegally obtained $1,889,400 from the loans and used more than a million of it to buy a home in West Jordan and in Las Vegas. Prosecutors said he also used more than $81,000 to buy a BMW M3 and a Jaguar F-PACE and invested $39,000 in cryptocurrency.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office said Mirenda repaid about $680,000 of the loan and the U.S. recovered about $1,251,469.29 through “the seizure of proceeds from the forced sale of the two homes in Utah and Nevada.”
This is not the first case in which Utah residents have been accused of fraudulently obtaining COVID-19 relief funds. A South Jordan man who was part of an alleged “COVID-19 fraud ring,” a former Olympian and a Herriman man are just a few examples of people accused of falsifying pay stubs, making false statements on applications or misusing the funds.
The U.S. Department of Justice announced last August that it had seized over $1.4 billion in Covid-19 relief funds that criminals had stolen. The department also charged over 3,000 people in federal districts across the country with crimes. Senator Mitt Romney called in March for the creation of a new oversight committee to step up congressional efforts to combat the fraudulent use of federal Covid-19 funds.
