A 68-year-old man with dual US and Italian citizenship was arrested on the Mediterranean island of Malta last week and accused of defrauding the US Navy of more than $50 million in fake port servicing contracts for Navy ships, the Washington Post reports.
Frank Rafaraci, chief executive of Multinational Logistics Services, or MLS, received $1.3 billion in contracts between 2011 and 2018 to refuel and resupply Navy ships in the Middle East, Asia and other ports of call.
MLS allegedly inflated the invoices for those services by $50 million. For example, in Manama, capital of the Persian Gulf kingdom of Bahrain, MLS charged the Navy port fees for a 2015 visit by the USS Carl Vinson $231,000 even though the port fees were only $12,686.
Besides the overbilling, Rafaraci is accused of paying cash bribes twice to a US Navy official who is cooperating with the investigation.
The fake expenses echo the “Fat Leonard” scandal from 2016, where a similar contractor who serviced ships in Southeast Asia and the Philippines in which that contractor overcharged $34 million.