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SALT LAKE CITY — The owner of a popular Italian restaurant was sentenced to a year in prison for stealing more than $1.88 million in COVID-19 relief funds.
Giuseppe Mirenda, 29, of Salt Lake City, is a co-owner of Sicilia Restaurant Management and five Utah restaurants, including the popular Sicilia Mia in Holladay. The U.S. Attorney's Office announced Thursday Mirenda was sentenced to one year plus 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 conversion of government property. His sentence includes three years of supervised release and a $250,000 fine.
Mirenda fraudulently applied for and signed agreements for six Economic Injury Disaster Loans in 2020, according to court documents. Economic Injury Disaster Loans were created under the CARES Act for small businesses struggling from the pandemic.
In 2021, he applied for another $520,000 in Economic Injury Disaster Loans, but they were denied.
Mirenda agreed in the loan applications that his loan proceeds would be used "solely as working capital to alleviate economic injury caused by the pandemic," the U.S. Attorney's Office said in a statement 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 said.
Mirenda unlawfully obtained $1,889,400 from the loans and used more than a million of it to buy a house 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 put $39,000 into cryptocurrency.
The U.S. attorney's office said Mirenda repaid about $680,000 of the loan money, and the U.S. recovered approximately $1,251,469.29 from "the seizure of the profits made from the forced sale of the two homes in Utah and Nevada."
This is not the first case of Utahns being accused of fraudulently receiving 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 faking payrolls, used false information on applications or misused the funds.
The U.S. Justice Department said last August it has seized over $1.4 billion in COVID-19 relief funds that criminals had stolen, and the department charged over 3,000 people with crimes in federal districts across the country. Sen. Mitt Romney in March called for the creation of a new oversight committee to expand the efforts Congress made to go after the fraudulent use of federal COVID-19 funds.
