Two Florida men have pleaded guilty to selling fake airplane parts to several Canadian airlines as well as a U.S. Department of Defense contractor for around eight years beginning in 2012.
50-year-old Daniel Navarro of Miami Lakes, Florida, was the vice president of Sofly Aviation Services, a spare parts distribution company for the airline industry, which stripped parts from old aircraft and then redistributed them to unsuspecting airlines by using faking airworthiness certificates.
Navarro pleaded guilty last week to one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States along with Sofly’s procurement and asset management specialist Jorge Guerrero, 71, of Hialeah, Florida.
Both men face a potential maximum sentence of up to five years imprisonment and a fine of $250,000. Navarro and Guerrero will also likely have to pay a large sum in restitution which will be determined at a sentencing hearing on May 23.
Court documents describe how Navarro and Guerrero would purchase “as removed” aircraft parts and then resell them to unsuspecting airlines by claiming they were airworthy as per standards drawn up by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), as well as Europe’s Air Standards Authority (EASA).
The spare parts would need to have been overhauled, tested and inspected to get the necessary approval tags to prove they were actually airworthy but there is no evidence that Navarro and Guerrero ever did this.
Instead, prosecutors claim the two men would fraudulently use an FAA approved repair station’s certificate number to falsely certify that the parts they were selling had been overhauled and inspected.
“The guilty pleas in this investigation should send a clear signal that nefarious schemes that comprise the integrity of the aviation industry’s supply chain for commercial and military aircraft will not be tolerated,” commented Joseph Harris, Special Agent-in-Charge, U.S. Department of Transportation Office of Inspector General (DOT OIG) on Tuesday.
“We will continue working with our federal, law enforcement, and prosecutorial partners to disrupt fraudulent activities that adversely impact aviation safety.”
Late last year, British investigators from the Serious Fraud Office arrested a suspect involved in selling fake airline spare parts that have led to the grounding of planes worldwide.
The investigation is linked to London-based AOG Technics Ltd, which specialized in selling spare parts for the CFM56 engine – one of the most popular aircraft engines in the world which powers many single-aisle Airbus A320 and Boeing 737 aircraft.
AOG is understood to have used falsely certified parts with forged documents to convince airlines and third-party suppliers of their legitimacy. The parts may have been older than advertised, second hand, or even fake.
As a result of the scandal, aircraft have been grounded worldwide in order to identify the fraudulent parts and swap them out for genuine parts.
