An Albertson man has been accused of stealing $30 million from a bank over a five-year span while he was the chief financial officer of a Brooklyn-based energy company.
Thomas Torre, the ex-CFO of Metro Fuel Oil Corp., is scheduled to be arraigned Friday before Judge Vera Scanlon at Brooklyn federal court on charges of bank fraud and conspiracy.
“The defendant and his co-conspirators obtained tens of millions of dollars in loans from New York Commercial Bank under false pretenses, claiming both that they had real collateral and that they intended to pay the money back,” said Loretta Lynch, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. “Neither claim was true.”
Prosecutors said the 63-year-old man schemed to overstate Metro Fuel’s accounts receivable in order to draw from a revolving line of credit issued by the bank from July 2007 to July 2012.
He and others allegedly misrepresented the true accounts receivable by deliberately failing to account for the cash payments received from customers and by creating fictitious invoice amounts, authorities said.
Metro Fuel filed for bankruptcy in September 2012 when company could no longer pay its bills. The company owed the bank more than $30 million by that time.
Torre faces up to 30 years in prison on each count.
