{"id":638,"date":"2006-01-30T09:49:04","date_gmt":"2006-01-30T17:49:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2006\/01\/ghoulish-3.html"},"modified":"2008-01-25T12:33:21","modified_gmt":"2008-01-25T17:33:21","slug":"ghoulish_2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/archives\/2006\/01\/ghoulish_2.html","title":{"rendered":"Ghoulish!"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Daily News reports that many small businesses took advantage of federal recovery grants following 9\/11<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Other unlikely recipients include subsidiaries of corporate giants Dell Inc., Morgan Stanley, The AXA Group and the Bank of China, records show.<\/p>\n

Even World Trade Center leaseholder Larry Silverstein’s company qualified for some small-business recovery aid.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

One couldn’t tell from ESDC records, for example, that “40 Wall Street LLC” is owned by Trump.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

See who else cashed in<\/a>. Names like “Dell,” “AXA Group,” “The Bank of China” and “Tamir Sapir”<\/a> abound.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jerk_move"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=638"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}