Oak Park has lost roughly $600,000 in investments due to fraud in the Illinois Metropolitan Investment Fund (IMET), according to Village Manager Cara Pavlicek.
During Monday’s village board meeting, Pavlicek said Oak Park has removed all of its investments from the fund, noting that the village is one of 293 Illinois municipalities that invested in the fund.
“Due to the fraud, there is slightly more than a half-million dollars due back to the village of Oak Park,” Pavlicek said.
But she added that Oak Park may never see those funds returned.
IMET released a statement in November, noting that the $50.4 million fund was invested in repurchase agreements backed by First Farmers Financial LLC.
“Please be assured that IMET is working diligently to recover the Convenience Fund’s investment in the [First Farmers Financial] Repo,” according to an IMET news release.
IMET learned in late September from its investment advisor, Pennant Management, that the “loans underlying the FFF Repo were fraudulently made.”
The IMET news release also states that guarantees, which were supposedly backed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, were forged.
“It is our understanding that there is no collateral pledged by the borrowers of the FFF loans since they were shell entities,” according to the IMET news release.
Craig Lesner, the village’s chief financial officer, told trustees the village has invested in IMET since 2000.