Brassington brothers to face US Court on March 4

Feb 14, 2009 News

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…following indictments ranging from defrauding to obtaining

money wrongfully

The owners and operators of Platinum Jet will, on March 4, appear before the United States District Court of New Jersey following a recent indictment that charged five of the company’s officials with “conspiracy to commit continuous willful violations of regulatory requirements for the operation of commercial charter aircraft.”

The indictment also accuses them of “routinely undertaking and concealing dangerous fuelling and weight distribution practices which existed on the Platinum-operated jet that failed to lift off at Teterboro on February 2, 2005.”

On that date, the jet left the end of the runway and failed to take off, causing it to cross Route 46, hit traffic along the way, and run into a clothing warehouse.

The plane was over-fuelled in a manner that caused its centre of gravity to exceed its forward weight limit for takeoff, contributing to the crash, according to the indictment, a practice used by the company to increase profits.

The arrested individuals include the President, Chief Executive Officer, chief pilot and co-founder Michael Brassington; his brother, Vice President and co-founder Paul Brassington; co-founder and managing member Andre Budhan, and Director of Maintenance, Brien McKenzie; pilot Francis Vieira and Director of Charters, Joseph Singh.

The Brassingtons are Guyanese, as are Francis Vieira and Joseph Singh. According to the indictment filed in the US against the individuals, the offences have been committed from at least as early as in or about November 2002 in the District of New Jersey.

The indictment also lists a scheme to defraud the United States by impeding, impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful governmental functions of the Federal Aviation Agency to regulate the operation of commercial aircraft in the United States.

“The object of the conspiracy was for the conspirators to enrich themselves by repeatedly violating airline safety and regulatory requirements while operating Platinum Jet as an on-demand commercial jet charter company.”

Under the indictment, it was pointed out that the defendants misrepresented to charter flight customers and jet charter brokers, in documents sent via facsimile and by other means, that Platinum Jet operated in compliance with the Federal Aviation Regulation safety standards.

It was a further part of the conspiracy that, beginning in or about November 2003, Platinum Jet commenced piggybacking on D.A., another charter airline service company located in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

Platinum Jet Management, LLC (“Platinum Jet”), with its principal place of operations in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, was a private, luxury charter airline service engaged in the business of operating, maintaining, and managing aircraft, including Canadair CL-600 jet planes.

Platinum Jet used these and other aircraft to provide on-demand domestic and international air charter services to charter brokers and individual customers paying as much as approximately US$90,000 per charter.

Platinum Jet did not hold a FAA operating certificate, authorising it to operate in the United States as an on-demand air charter operation. As such, in 2003, Platinum Jet entered into a ‘piggybacking’ or ‘certificate sharing’ agreement with D.A. which did have a certificate.

This piggybacking arrangement was to enable Platinum Jet to operate commercial charter flights under D.A.’s certificate, insofar as D.A. maintained operational control over all Platinum Jet flight activities.

In the indictment, it was pointed out that a further part of the conspiracy was that defendants falsified weight-and-balance graphs by manually changing the starting point on those graphs to a different balance of weight (BOW) and centre of gravity, in order to make it appear as if the aircraft were within weight-and-balance limits, when in fact they were not.

Earlier, US media reports claimed that a former Customs agent had implicated the same Michael Brassington, whose full name is Michael Francis Brassington, as part of a ring of corrupt Customs officials under investigation by the Department of Homeland Security.

Brassington was also the co-pilot on a drug-running Lear jet (N351WB), caught by DEA agents at Orlando Executive Airport in July 2000 carrying 43 pounds of heroin.

The Guyanese pilot was in the news again recently, this time in his native Guyana, when he was named in a procurement scandal over the disputed purchase by the Guyana Defence Force of two antique 30-year-old helicopters from a ‘dummy’ company in Delaware.

It was further discovered that Brassington’s father, also named Michael Brassington, has close business ties with one of the most notorious oligarchs in the Russian mob, Oleg Deripaska, the “last man standing” in the Aluminium Wars in Russia during the 1990s for control of that strategic resource.

Brassington’s name also surfaced in connection with the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, because he had been the co-pilot on the drug-running Lear jet (N351WB) owned by Wallace Hilliard. Hilliard also owned the Venice, Florida flight school where Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi were at the time learning to fly.

Further reports reveal that, in August 2005, a court temporarily revoked Brassington’s airline transport pilot certificate (Number 083722815) for falsifying manifest sheets and trip itinerary logs.

The company’s passenger lists, sources said, including former President George H.W. Bush, basketball great Shaquille O’Neal, Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Montana, rappers Jay Z, Sean “Diddy” Combs, Snoop Dogg, actor Burt Reynolds, movie producer Harvey Weinstein, Beyonce, and crime author Patricia Cornwell, among others.

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