NEW YORK – The state Attorney General’s Office and Rockland County District Attorney announced a $4.3 million settlement with Oak Beverages, Inc. of Blauvelt for falsely inflating the number of empty bottle returns it received, resulting in a failure to turn over more than $1.8 million in unpaid deposits to the state. That is a violation of the state’s bottle bill.
The Rockland DA’s office has also charged the company’s general manager, Manuel Busto, Sr., with grand larceny and criminal tax fraud, both as felonies.
Beverage distributors like Oak Beverages must collect a five-cent deposit on every container and keep the money in trust for the state. Distributors pay out deposits when empty containers are returned and on a quarterly basis they must turn over to the state 80 percent of any deposits collected but not paid out for returned containers together with a report of the amounts at issues.
Distributors keep the remaining 20 percent of the unpaid deposits.
Parallel investigations by the two agencies found that to keep more of the deposit funds it was holding in trust for the state, Oak Beverages systematically and falsely inflated the number of empty containers it received and reported those numbers in quarterly reports to the state.
Busto allegedly would modify customer invoices from several driver’s daily route records to exaggerate the number of empty containers collected.
Hudson Valley unemployment up in March
April 30, 2024
