Ghoulish!

The Daily News reports that many small businesses took advantage of federal recovery grants following 9/11:

Donald Trump, the Rockefeller Group and Ford Models were among the tycoons and huge corporations that received federal 9/11 recovery grants earmarked by Congress for small businesses, a Daily News investigation has found.

Other unlikely recipients include subsidiaries of corporate giants Dell Inc., Morgan Stanley, The AXA Group and the Bank of China, records show.

Even World Trade Center leaseholder Larry Silverstein’s company qualified for some small-business recovery aid.

The firms were allowed to collect small-business grants because the state agency that dished out the free money, the Empire State Development Corp., ignored the federal definition of a small business and adopted a much looser standard.

The ESDC used employee counts — setting the maximum for its $556 million Business Recovery Grant program at 500 workers — to determine whether applicants were small businesses.

Federal law requires that the size category of the types of businesses most common in lower Manhattan — finance, insurance, real estate and law firms — be determined based on annual revenue. Only the wholesale, manufacturing and mining sectors — obviously uncommon downtown — are measured by number of employees.

Also, in totaling the number of employees, the ESDC didn’t require applicants to include employees of subsidiaries and other affiliated businesses. Federal regulations require that linked companies are included in determining whether a business is small. The News found dozens of examples of large firms slipping through as small ones.

One couldn’t tell from ESDC records, for example, that “40 Wall Street LLC” is owned by Trump.

The Donald bills himself as the “largest real estate developer in New York,” Last week, Trump sued a New York Times reporter for concluding in a book that the host of “The Apprentice” isn’t a billionaire.

But the ESDC’s rules transformed Trump into a small-business man. His company collected a $150,000 grant for losses at 40 Wall St. The grant application describes the corporation through which Trump owns that building as having 28 employees and $26.8 million in annual revenues.

That passed the ESDC’s small business test of less than 500 employees. But the revenue amount would put the single Trump property over the federal definition of a small business — which is $6 million annually for lessors of nonresidential buildings.

See who else cashed in. Names like “Dell,” “AXA Group,” “The Bank of China” and “Tamir Sapir” abound.