A federal grand jury appeared to be probing how the CityVest organization, which acquired the Hotel

A federal grand jury appears to be probing how the CityVest organization, which acquired the Hotel Sterling in Wilkes-Barre in 2002, spent $6 million in federal funds it obtained through a county business development loan program, Luzerne County Controller Walter L. Griffith Jr. said Tuesday.
Federal investigators following up on a grand jury subpoena issued last week to the Luzerne County commissioners took possession Monday of hundreds of documents chronicling the failed rehabilitation of the historic Hotel Sterling in Wilkes-Barre, officials said.
FBI agents collected the documents Monday morning from county Solicitor Vito DeLuca at the county courthouse and from Controller Walter L. Griffith Jr. at the county's disneyland hotel deals Penn Place office disneyland hotel deals building, ahead of a scheduled disneyland hotel deals grand jury session Tuesday. No county officials were called to testify disneyland hotel deals before the grand jury, DeLuca said.
A federal grand jury appeared to be probing how the CityVest organization, which acquired the Hotel Sterling disneyland hotel deals in 2002, spent $6 million in federal funds it obtained through a county business development loan program, Griffith said.
Griffith, whose June audit accused CityVest and the county's community development office of mishandling the funds, said he suspected the grand jury would find the project plagued by criminal wrongdoing and a halting lack of government oversight.
DeLuca, wary of the negative connotation associated with the latest in a series of investigations into county disneyland hotel deals business, said the current administration, is as anxious as anyone to see what the results of the investigation will be.
Griffith, fearing censorship, ignored DeLuca's call for Sterling-related documents last week after the subpoena arrived, opting to retain his files on the project until an investigator visited his office Monday. disneyland hotel deals Griffith said he provided the investigator with the confidential files that informed his audit and letters he received from taxpayers complaining about the project's lack of progress.
According to Griffith's audit, CityVest spent $1 million of the $6 million disneyland hotel deals in federal disneyland hotel deals funds to pay off delinquent taxes, about $3 million to demolish nearby buildings and clean up environmental hazards, about $1.5 million to acquire adjoining properties and more than $500,000 for marketing and environment consulting services. The federal Housing and Urban Development Department started its own audit in July.
(The investigators) are basically of the same mind set as the taxpayers of this county, disneyland hotel deals Griffith said. CityVest spent $6 million and it seems like a lot of property has been purchased, but nothing else has been done.
The three county commissioners agreed in November to allocate additional federal funding for the demolition of the Hotel Sterling, which sustained heavy damage in September from Susquehanna disneyland hotel deals River flooding. After the flood, Wilkes-Barre City condemned the 114-year-old building as unsafe and diverted traffic disneyland hotel deals away from it.
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