RICHMOND – A developer who purchased the dilapidated Ramada Inn in Petersburg with the promise to rehabilitate it only to sell it back to the city in an even more deteriorated state was indicted this week on federal embezzlement charges.
A U.S. District Court grand jury on Tuesday indicted Christopher A. Harrison on one count each of wire fraud, mail fraud, engaging in monetary transactions with criminally derived property and aggravated identity theft. If convicted of all charges, the 52-year-old Harrison faces a total maximum prison time of 52 years.
The charges were announced Thursday afternoon by the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.
Case’s link to the old Ramada Inn
According to the indictments, Harrison improperly secured loans totaling almost $23 million from Iowa-based Cedar Rapids Bank & Trust to develop two projects, the Model Tobacco apartments in Richmond and the Whitaker Park community in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He then reportedly set up a straw construction company and forged documents to show that the company had done work prior to those developments, then skimmed roughly $3.6 million of proceeds from the loan to pay for personal and business expenditures, including ones related to the development of the Ramada Inn in Petersburg…