A Washington, D.C. businessman who built a Covid-era loan fraud on lies about his companies, his finances and even his own identity has been sentenced to seven years in federal prison. Jose “Joe” Biaou, 42, a citizen of Benin who lives in the District, was sentenced on Tuesday, November 10, in U.S. District Court to 84 months in federal prison, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia announced.
Source: U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia
Mr. Biaou built his scheme on lies — lies about his business, his finances, even his identity. This sentence reflects the seriousness of his fraud and the consequences that follow. Stealing emergency relief funds is stealing from the American people.
Biaou, the founder of FRB Capital Group LLC, was found guilty on February 17 by a federal jury of six counts of wire fraud and one count of aggravated identity theft. Alongside the prison term, Judge Christopher R. Cooper ordered him to serve 24 months of supervised release after prison and to pay $3,417,542.77 in restitution.
How the scheme worked
According to the government's evidence at trial, Biaou applied for more than $5 million in loans and received more than $3.5 million in proceeds from two Covid emergency programs — the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program — on behalf of FRB Capital Group LLC and a second entity, Millenium Global Finance, which prosecutors showed was an entity with no employees and no operations.
The Millenium application alone brought in $1.25 million in PPP funds after Biaou represented that the firm had 52 employees and an average monthly payroll of more than $520,000 throughout 2019. Millenium Global Finance, the court heard, was not a real company.
For his own company, the picture prosecutors painted was of paperwork inflated at every line. FRB Capital Group LLC is a brokerage firm for the commercial real estate industry; on his applications for federal emergency funding, Biaou consistently inflated the number of FRB employees, as well as their average monthly salaries, office rents and other financial information. He then applied for forgiveness of one of the PPP loans, again submitting false information about how his business had spent the funds during the pandemic.
The identity lie sat underneath all of it. In support of his EIDL applications, Biaou falsely claimed that he was a U.S. citizen and provided a counterfeit birth certificate — one he had forged using a copy of his minor daughter's birth certificate. The daughter is not named in the court reporting and is not accused of anything; the forgery was his act, prosecutors said.
Money meant for a national emergency
The PPP and EIDL programs were created to keep American businesses and workers afloat during the Covid-19 pandemic — emergency, taxpayer-provided funds that were supposed to cover payrolls and keep firms alive through lockdowns. That is why prosecutors frame cases like this one so starkly: every dollar taken on a fictitious payroll was a dollar taken from a fund built for a national crisis, and the restitution order is meant to claw the money back to the public.
The case was investigated by the United States Postal Inspection Service — Washington Division, and prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Sungtae Kang. Biaou had been arrested on July 17, 2024, after an indictment returned the day before, and the jury that convicted him in February deliberated for less than a day. The sentencing closes a case that ran from a July 2024 arrest through a February trial to Tuesday's hearing.
What happens next is mechanical but long: an 84-month federal term, then 24 months of supervised release, with the $3.4 million restitution obligation hanging over him throughout. The Justice Department noted that on April 7 it created a National Fraud Enforcement Division focused on fraud against the American people — and Biaou's sentence is the kind of result that division was built to produce.