CLEVELAND – Another straw borrower in the massive loan fraud at St. Paul Croatian FCU on Thursday was sentenced to two weeks in prison for borrowing $260,000 he never intended to repay from the ill-fated $240-million credit union.
John Cendol, Jr., 48, is the brother of Rose Ann Nikolovski, whose ex-husband, purported Macedonian crime lord Koljo Nikolovski, has pleaded guilty to having obtained as much as $6 million from the fraud.
Cendol is the fifth member of the Nikolovski family to plead guilty to the fraud. Also convicted were his wife, Ruth Cendol, and Koljo Nikolovski’s nephew, Marko Nikoli.
At least 12 individuals have been convicted so far in the massive fraud, which is projected to cost NCUA $170 million to resolve, making it the biggest fraud in credit union history.
Koljo Nikolovski transferred the proceeds from his and his family’s loans to bank accounts in his native Albania and Macedonia. As part of a plea bargain, he has agreed to pay $3.3 million of the funds to NCUA as restitution. A local church, Holy Love Ministries, earlier this week filed a claim in court for $1.5 million of those funds for reimbursement for the deposits it lost when NCUA liquidated the credit union in May 2010.
