The owner of the Boston-area's Stash's Pizza shops was sentenced to two further years in prison on Wednesday for defrauding the U.S. Small Business Administration out of about $500,000, federal prosecutors said.
Westwood resident Stavros "Steve" Papantoniadis, 50, pleaded guilty in February to making false statements to the SBA in order to obtain a loan for a business he no longer owned.
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Papantoniadis was sentenced to over 8 years in prison last October for forcing or trying to force six employees to work excessively through threats of violence and deportation.
Papantoniadis, who operated the pizzerias, applied for an Economic Injury Disaster Loan, intended to assist small businesses recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, between November 2021 and January 2022.
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In his application, he claimed that he still owned a pizzeria in Randolph and had 18 employees working there despite having sold the location several months earlier in April 2021, prosecutors said. Based on the false information he submitted, Papantoniadis received $499,900 from the SBA.
A federal judge on Wednesday sentenced Papantoniadis to two years in prison followed by a year of supervised release and $534,462.01 in restitution.
That comes on top of his sentence of 102 months in prison, a year of supervised release and a $35,000 fine in the forced labor case. Six months of the new sentence will run consecutive with the 102 months Papantoniadis already has to serve, prosecutors said.
