Feds sue North Carolina BBQ owner for using pandemic funds to buy FedEx store
The owner of the popular Hillbilly’s BBQ in Gaston County promised to use federal money to help keep his business afloat during the pandemic. Instead, he bought a FedEx store.
He’ll now pay the federal government $1.5 million to settle a civil lawsuit against him, the U.S. attorney’s office in Charlotte said Monday.
Bobby Gerald Duncan, the owner of the Charlotte-area barbecue restaurant, spent nearly all of his $762,000 of pandemic relief money to buy a second, unrelated business with a “longtime friend,” according to a civil lawsuit filed by the U.S. attorney for the Western District of North Carolina.
He used $750,000 from the Paycheck Protection Program and two Economic Injury Disaster Loans to buy a FedEx store, according to a complaint filed Friday in Charlotte’s U.S. District Court.
Prosecutors said Duncan “unquestionably used the relief funds” to buy the store. Without them, according to prosecutors’ calculations, he would have been more than $600,000 in debt.
Duncan previously asked the government to forgive the loans and “certified under oath” that the relief funds were used explicitly for pandemic-related expenses.
“They were not,” Assistant U.S. Attorney J. Seth Johnson wrote in the settlement agreement.
Duncan agreed to pay more than $1.5 million to settle the lawsuit the same day prosecutors filed it, according to court records.
“Pandemic relief funds were meant to provide a financial lifeline to small businesses struggling to stay afloat during the unprecedented COVID crisis,” U.S. Attorney Russ Ferguson in a statement Monday. “Where those funds were misused, we will pursue their return as part of our ongoing effort to curb waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer money.”
