Culver City restaurant owner faces up to 20 years in prison for $4 million COVID relief fraud

A Culver City man who owns restaurants and hotels in California and two other states faces up to 20 years in federal prison after pleading guilty in connection with fraudulently obtaining more than $4 million in COVID relief loans.

Philip Frederick Camino, 45, owns businesses based in several parts of the greater Los Angeles area including Westwood, Hollywood, Beverly Hills and Studio City as well as a hospitality company that has developed hotels and restaurants in Kentucky and Tennessee. He has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in connection with submitting false applications to the U.S. Small Business Administration and banks for the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) as well as the Economic Injury Disaster Loans (EIDL) program.

He sent in more than 20 fraudulent loan applications to obtain millions of dollars in government money from April 2020 to April 2021.

At the time, the federal government had issued public loan programs to help struggling businesses — particularly restaurants shuttered across the U.S. as COVID-19 stay-at-home orders remained in place for several months. 

Camino has pleaded guilty to lying on applications for loans, filling out false tax forms that had never actually been filed with the IRS and inflating how many employees were on the payroll of his businesses. As part of the fraud, prosecutors say Camino paid more than $100,000 in kickbacks to an accomplice.

In one instance, according to prosecutors, he emailed false documents to a bank as part of a fraudulent application for a $144,270 PPP loan on behalf of a company controlled by his co-conspirator.

He is scheduled to be sentenced during a court hearing on March 6, 2025 and faces a maximum possible prison sentence of 20 years.

The case was investigated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, FBI and IRS Criminal Investigation.