A Culver City man who owns restaurants and hotels in California and two other states faces up to 20 years in prison after pleading guilty to fraudulently obtaining more than $4 million in COVID-19 relief loans.
Philip Frederick Camino, 45, owns businesses in several parts of the Los Angeles area, including Westwood, Hollywood, Beverly Hills and Studio City, and a hospitality company that has developed hotels and restaurants in Kentucky and Tennessee. He has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in connection with the filing of false applications with the U.S. Small Business Administration and banks for the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and the Economic Injury Disaster Loans (EIDL) programs.
Between April 2020 and April 2021, he filed more than 20 fraudulent loan applications to obtain millions of dollars in government funds.
At the time, the federal government had issued public loan programs to help struggling businesses, particularly restaurants that were closed across the U.S. as COVID-19 restrictions remained in place for several months.
Camino has pleaded guilty to lying on loan applications, filling out false tax forms that were never filed with the IRS and inflating the number of employees on his companies’ payrolls. As part of the fraud, prosecutors say Camino paid more than $100,000 in bribes to an accomplice.
In one instance, prosecutors say, he emailed false documents to a bank as part of a fraudulent application for a $144,270 PPP loan on behalf of a company managed by his accomplice.
His sentence is expected to be announced at a court hearing on March 6, 2025. He faces a maximum prison sentence of 20 years.
The case was investigated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and the IRS Criminal Division.
