A decade after my reporting linked an Irvine industrial building near John Wayne Airport to an international trade caper involving tariff-evading aluminum shipments from China, a collection of Southern California warehousing companies has agreed to a pricey settlement with the U.S. government.<\/p>\n
The\u00a0Department of Justice\u00a0announced in mid-May that five related property owners with foreign ties, including\u00a0Von Karman-Main Street LLC, had agreed to pay $549.5 million \u201cto resolve allegations that they violated the False Claims Act by knowingly and improperly evading, or conspiring to evade, antidumping and countervailing duties owed to the United States on aluminum extrusions imported from the People\u2019s Republic of China.\u201d<\/p>\n
Von Karman-Main Street LLC\u00a0had been the\u00a0registered owner of\u00a02323 Main St., a nearly 261,000-square-foot warehouse that sits at one of the busier intersections in Irvine.<\/p>\n
Starting in 2011, the defendants \u201cknowingly and improperly avoided antidumping and countervailing duties owed on more than 2.2 million aluminum extrusions in the form of \u2018pallets,\u2019 which they misrepresented to [customs officials] as finished merchandise not subject to antidumping and countervailing duties,\u201d the DOJ said in a May 13 statement.<\/p>\n
Those aluminum pallets\u2014much heavier than traditional pallets typically used for shipping\u2014were brought into the U.S. for the purpose of being melted for other uses, the DOJ alleged.<\/p>\n
The defendants, with other properties in Fontana, Ontario and Riverside, were at one point charged with evading $1.5 billion in tariffs through their scheme.<\/p>\n
The\u00a02323 Main St.\u00a0warehouse was acquired\u00a0by the LLC\u00a0in 2009, and for years it sat largely unused, a rarity given the low vacancy rate for industrial buildings in the area at the time.<\/p>\n
That changed in 2016, when the Business Journal reported on an odd sight in the airport area. A line of trucks began queuing up along Main Street and Von Karman Avenue to unload shipments at the property. A bulk of the trucks bore the name of\u00a0Wan Hai Lines, a Taiwan-based shipping firm with a presence at the Port of Long Beach.<\/p>\n
The building was nearly full within several days with stacks of what appeared to be aluminum sheets and aluminum pallets.<\/p>\n
The property\u2019s ties to a larger enterprise soon became apparent. A\u00a0Wall Street Journal\u00a0report around the same time noted how a Chinese billionaire-backed firm with ties to the Irvine building had embarked on \u201ca brazen scheme\u201d to \u201cgame the global trade system.\u201d<\/p>\n
Among other allegations, the Chinese company at one point stockpiled nearly 6% of the world\u2019s inventory of aluminum at a remote factory in Mexico, the WSJ reported.<\/p>\n
Prior to the Business Journal\u2019s reporting, only one U.S. facility, a warehouse in New Jersey, had been identified as holding the Chinese company\u2019s aluminum shipping pallets.<\/p>\n
By the time the U.S. government\u2019s formal charges were unveiled against the defendants in 2017, the 2323 Main building was empty again; the aluminum was allegedly moved from Southern California to Vietnam.<\/p>\n
Federal prosecutors initially attempted to seize ownership of the Irvine building, but that move wasn\u2019t successful.\u00a02323 Main St. traded hands last month for $32 million; a conversion to housing could be in the cards.<\/p>\n
Finally, the well-known Newport Beach Car Wash has closed. Insider has learned that Irvine Company is buying the property and plans to redevelop it. More updates to come.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A decade after my reporting linked an Irvine industrial building near John Wayne Airport to an international trade…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":211783,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[163,165,164],"class_list":["post-361534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anaheim","tag-anaheim","tag-anaheim-headlines","tag-anaheim-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=361534"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361534\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/211783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=361534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=361534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=361534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}