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Officials announced on Thursday that a Hampton-based U.S. defense contractor and four of its employees were sentenced for engaging in an extensive procurement fraud scheme.<\/p>\n
The scheme involved millions in government contracts that targeted the U.S. Department of Defense and other federal government agencies.<\/p>\n
David sends.<\/p>\n
The contractor provided everything from swimming trunks for West Point cadets to spools of concertina wire, all made in China, prosecutors said<\/em><\/p>\n By Lukas I. Alpert<\/strong><\/p>\n It was as far from \u201cMade in the USA\u201d as you can get.<\/p>\n A Virginia-based defense contractor has been sentenced to nearly five years in prison for selling more than $7 million in goods to the U.S. military that were labeled as having been made in the USA but were actually manufactured in China, the Department of Justice said.<\/p>\n Beyung S. Kim, 62, of Newport News, Va., the owner of Iris Kim Inc., admitted that he had imported items from China for years but then cut off their Made in China tags and replaced them with labels that said Made in the USA before selling the items to various branches of the military.<\/p>\n Kim\u2019s company provided goods ranging from swimsuits for cadets at West Point and promotional T-shirts for the Army\u2019s stunt parachute team, the Golden Knights, to water bottles emblazoned with the logo for the Marine Corps. The company also procured T-shirts for the National Guards of Indiana, North Dakota and Arkansas as well as spools of concertina wire and wire ropes for the Coast Guard.<\/p>\n In all, the company signed dozens of contracts with the Department of Defense between 2011 and 2018 worth $24 million. Prosecutors say Kim would procure the goods from China and have them shipped to a warehouse in the U.S. He then enlisted the help of a labelling firm to remove all trace of the items\u2019 origin and relabel them as being Made in the USA.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Cheap Chinese counterfeit parts can’t meet engineering specifications and will fail, with potentially deadly results. Like having a mooring line unexpectedly part under tension. Scary and it happens fast.<\/p>\n Hang the bastards.<\/p>\n Market Watch.com<\/a><\/p>\n Thanks, David.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"