A Phoenix businesswoman, Bridget C. O’Brien was sentenced in Maricopa County Superior Court to 2 years in prison for her role in a multimillion-dollar fraud against the federal government’s Small Business Administration (SBA).
O’Brien’s sentence is to be followed by 3 years of probation, and also ordered to pay the SBA $1,273,794.95 in restitution.
According to the Arizona Attorney General Office (AGO), the investigation into O’Brien and her companies had developed evidence that O’Brien applied for $2.9 million in SBA loans between March 202 and January 2021, with applications for these twenty-three loans containing gross material misrepresentations. These material misrepresentations allowed O’Brien’s shell companies, holding companies, and real estate ventures to obtain loan funds which they would not have otherwise been awarded if the applications were completed honestly.
The AGO says that a particularly glaring misuse of funds occurred when multiple payments from O’Brien’s SBA funded bank account were made to a real estate title agency as part of the purchase of a $1.9 million luxury home in Phoenix. In addition to the payments on the home, the loan funds were also used for many other unauthorized personal expenses including, but not limited to: personal dining, travel, clothing, home furniture, rent payments to O’Brien’s rental home, tuition payment, as well as volleyball lessons for O’Brien’s child.