From overpriced coffee mugstodropping millions on seafood in a month– stories about government over-spending are pretty legendary. Even worse? Stories about the government being less than accountable when it comes to common sense spending habits are just as frequent.
The latest? A Pentagon purchase sporting a $20-million price tag. Among the items purchased were 200 parkas that were supposed to “counter night-vision goggles.” These were marketed to help protect American troops stationed in Afghanistan. Sounds okay, right? One problem…they didn’t work. Why? Because they were apparently counterfeit.
It seems the stuff was purchased from a Chinese company that the Justice Department now says has been counterfeiting products and making them look like genuine from January 2013 to October 2018. In the case of these knock-off parkas, they didn’t have the near-infrared tech they were supposed to have…so the soldiers wearing them would’ve never known they werean easy target.
To be fair, this wasn’t the fault of the military. The purchase was made through Ramin Kohanbash, a wholesaler in New York. Court docs show that he and his associates allegedly tooklegitimateU.S. uniform samples and then sent them to China to be replicated. That’s where they were inferiorly replicated and shipped back…and once here, they were marketed as the real deal and American-made – as per the Berry Amendment and the Trade Agreements Act which require goods to be American made, of from “select counties”…of which China isn’t one.
Kohanbash is expected in court June 12thand faces 10-years in federal prison, and to half a million in fines.
Source:Military Times