Pakistani gets shafted by Pakistanis, then blames Islamophobia and Pakiphobia

Signing his life away!

By Anjum Niaz

Picking up the wrong guys, Hafeez walked into a trap and bought a convenience store from a Pakistani calling himself Toni who had an impressive business card detailing the nature of his trade: "C-store/Gas Station buying/Selling, Consultants For Ground up Project, Most cases 99 per cent Finance Available."

Toni was asking for $880,000 for the store. Popping out of his hat was the banker, another Pakistani, an employee of Bank United, a subsidiary of Washington Mutual, who provided the cash to Hafeez as a loan under the SBA or Small Business Association.

The one window operation - made up of the unctuous seller and his shady partner, the banker - appeared an ideal fit for Hafeez, shopping around for a business and a loan. It sounded too good to be true, he thought.

Indeed. The duo rushed him through the paperwork, filling in the information and checking the boxes for the loan on behalf of Hafeez. All he did as an eager buyer was to initial each page and put his signature at the end of the loan application, never bothering with the fine print.Out of the blue, one day, Hafeez was told he had committed a bank fraud. He had signed on the Small Business Association (SBA) loan application that tick-marked him as a US citizen (USC). This is a criminal offence.

"All the paperwork was filled out by the banker and not Hafeez. He never gave the banker any false information ... Hafeez's only fault was not reading or noticing the paperwork closely enough, assuming everything was filled out properly and everything was ligit (legitimate)," says an utterly devastated Ayesha.

All hell was let loose on the Hafeez household as the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested him last August for: "Lying about his citizenship on his application for a Small Business Administration (SBA) guaranteed loan ... ICE protects the integrity and security of the US economy by targeting and eliminating systematic vulnerabilities in the financial and trade sectors."

"The SBA loan programme," says the ICE website "is one of the systems that can be exploited ... the loans secured through the Small Business Administration are intended to encourage the entrepreneurial spirit and promote the nation's economy."

It displays the names of the eight people (six of them Pakistanis, Hafeez included) who "allegedly secured through fraud" SBA loans that "totalled more than $5.5 million".

The rest of the five Pakistanis pleaded guilty and have since been deported back to Pakistan. But Hafeez is holding his ground and his attorney has filed for "selective persecution", which means that the ICE has only singled out Pakistanis. Ayesha calls it a "witch hunt".

The ICE is the "largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)" and is responsible for "identifying and shutting down vulnerabilities in the nation's border, economic, transportation and infrastructure security".

But according to Ayesha Adriana Hafeez: "The US government is trying to incriminate my husband as part of a larger scam involving Pakistanis in Texas ... in their eyes all Pakistanis are crooks."

Even her paediatrician told her that he bought his building through the SBA: "He said nobody reads all those pages ... of course he's American and doesn't have to face such a harsh sentence that immigrants are handed down, were he to make the same mistake."

According to the Dallas Business Journal, Bank United, acquired by Washington Mutual (WAMU) "has ceased operations as a US Small Business Administration (SBA) lender of loans nationwide. The banker's decision was triggered by lawsuits against the WAMU and an ongoing investigation by the SBA of land flips and inflated SBA loans involved in the sale of an estimated 100 convenience stores in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex and in Houston."

Networks of Pakistani business people reported the Journal in 2003, could have "bilked" SBA out of "upward of $100 million between 1998 and 2000 in deals involving convenience stores, gas stations, hotels and other properties across Texas."