15 Months in Prison for Fraud, Money Laundering, and Unlawful Export of Technical Data

Yuksel Senbol, 36, of Orlando, Florida, was sentenced today to 15 months in prison for conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering, conspiracy to violate the Export Control Reform Act, and conspiracy to violate the Arms Export Control Act.

As part of her sentence, the court also entered an order of forfeiture for $275,430.90, the proceeds of Senbol’s fraud and money laundering scheme.

According to facts taken from public filings, in approximately April 2019, Senbol operated a front company in the Middle District of Florida called Mason Engineering Parts LLC. She used this front company to assist her co-conspirators, Mehmet Ozcan and Onur Simsek, in fraudulently procuring contracts to supply critical military components to the Department of Defence. These components were intended for use in the Navy Nimitz and Ford Class Aircraft Carriers, Navy Submarines, Marine Corps Armored Vehicles, and Army M-60 Series Tank and Abrahams Battle Tanks, among other weapons systems.

To fraudulently procure the government contracts, Senbol and her co-conspirators falsely represented to the U.S. government and U.S. military contractors that Mason Engineering Parts LLC was a vetted and qualified manufacturer of military components, when, in fact, the parts were being manufactured by Ozcan and Simsek in Turkey.

As Senbol knew, Simsek’s involvement had to be concealed from the U.S. government because he had been debarred from contracting with the U.S. government after being convicted of a virtually identical scheme in the Southern District of Florida.

To enable Ozcan and Simsek to manufacture the components in Turkey, Senbol assisted them in obtaining sensitive, export-controlled drawings of critical U.S. military technology. Using software that allowed Ozcan to remotely control her computer — and thus evade security restrictions that limited access to these sensitive military drawings to computers within the United States — Senbol knowingly facilitated the illegal export of these drawings. She did so despite having executed numerous agreements promising to safeguard the drawings from unlawful access or export and despite the explicit warning of each drawing that it could not be exported without obtaining a license.

Once Ozcan and Simsek manufactured the components in Turkey, they shipped them to Senbol, who repackaged them — removing any reference to their Turkish origin. The conspirators then lied about the origin of the parts to the U.S. government and a U.S. government contractor to receive payment for the parts. Senbol then laundered hundreds of thousands of dollars in criminal proceeds back to Turkey through international wire transfers.

This scheme continued until federal investigators uncovered and disrupted it. The U.S. military tested parts supplied by Senbol and determined that they did not conform to product specifications. Many of the components provided to the U.S. military by Senbol were “critical application items,” meaning that failure of these components could have potentially rendered the end system inoperable.

Source

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/defense-contractor-sentenced-15-months-prison-fraud-money-laundering-and-unlawful-export