Some learn ethical behavior after they suffer consequences, and oddly, some don’t. It is often a matter of unbridled arrogance, of men and women believing they are smarter and brighter than everyone else. Mukund Mohan was one of those men.
There is no doubt as to Mukun’s intelligence. He was a director at both Microsoft and Amazon, in their business and new ventures departments. He just pleaded guilty to a March 2020 fraud scheme to steal nearly $5.5 million in government funding. He spread this attempt at PPP theft out through eight disaster loan requests. Ironically, the various requests rather than a single lump sum might have saved him from a worse fate.
As it is, Mohan is looking at two years in jail for trying to defraud the Small Business Administration (SBA). He is charged with wire fraud and money laundering and must pay $1.8 in restitution for money he has already stolen and a fine of $100,000.
In applying for the loans, he submitted phony tax filings and articles of incorporation along with faked supporting documents. This was not his first attempt at fraud. He has been caught lying about investments and lying to investors in regard to 11 companies he claimed he founded over a five-year period (roughly 2008 to 2012).
The PPP documents he filed using forged documents, claimed he needed the fund to keep (fictitious) workers employed in several shell companies. He claimed (through the fictitious documents) that the businesses were purchased prior to 2020. They weren’t. Of the companies he claimed he owned, only a firm called “Mahenjo” existed prior to May 2020. However, the company had no business and no employees.
Web of Lies
As the legal trap was closing around him and he admitted his guilt, he said in part:
“I hurt people who trusted me, believed in me, and now are beside themselves…seeking help is what I am doing. I think the road ahead, though, will be very long.”
Confessions of guilt are often part of a fraudster’s process to lessen the load of penalties and I intimately understand that thinking. However, he has been at this a long time. The India-based e-magazine, Inc42, detailed Mohan’s activities going back six years ago.
“Of the five companies claimed to be founded by him, apart from [one company] BuzzGain, none of his startups performed successfully or raised any funding. Some of them even vanished without a trace…he claimed to have invested in three startups — ChargeBee, SignEasy, and Appointy — through his early-stage startup fund Napkin Stage…”
However, even his startup fund was a fraud.
The man seemed legitimate enough in terms of his work for Amazon and Microsoft, but rather than actually working at building a career – or even to build a hi-tech startup from scratch, he created and dropped companies that never really existed to ultimately serve him as shell companies.
Of PPP funding during the worst of the pandemic, possibly no other government response to a challenge in the history of this nation has created such an ethical defining line as this business subsidy. While most of the millions of ventures, large and small, were honest, some took collective advantage into the billions of dollars.
To this day, the government is still unraveling the ethical mess created by PPP. For as bright and seemingly contrite as men such as Mohan appeared to be, he followed the three elements of fraud as though he was the lowest of common criminals.
He saw an opportunity to take the money as there was inadequate oversite. To that end, he faked a series of documents including tax forms believing no one would check.
He had an obvious need for money, and perhaps a power game where he could prove to himself that he was an intellectually superior being.
Finally, Mohan rationalized that this was free money and that the government had unlimited amounts.
Mukund Mohan believed he was the brightest guy in the room. Many arrogant people do that. Incredibly, a lower-level, honest, hard-working, motivated auditor saw serious discrepancies with the loan applications and stopped the game. Mohan will have plenty of time to think while in jail.
