Former SF permit expediter and one-time president of the Department of Building Inspection Commission Rodrigo Santos is out of prison after the time he did for Mohammed Nuru scandal-related crimes, but he just got hit with a $1.4 million fine for fraud.
Easily the most hilarious detail from the sprawling Mohammed Nuru city corruption scandal was the nugget that former SF Department of Building Inspection Commission president Rodrigo Santos was telling his permit expediter clients to make their checks out to “DBI,” but was then hand-forging those checks to be made out to “RoDBIgo Santos.” As crude as this scheme may sound, he did this more than 200 times and successfully bilked $420,000 out of his clients.
Here's an example of how former SF Building Inspection Commission President Rodrigo Santos altered checks made out to "DBI" to "RoDBIgo Santos" so he could allegedly deposit them into his personal bank account. He's facing federal bank fraud charges pic.twitter.com/Ru3ttNzCQ2
— Michael Bott (@TweetBottNBC) May 14, 2020
But that was hardly Santos’s only crime — submitting forged documents to the FBI was kind of a big one too. The SF City Attorney’s Office has also charged his permit expediting business, Santos & Urrutia Inc, with a years-long pattern of obtaining very minor city permits, and then doing far more involved excavation jobs than what the permits enabled. And as you may remember, Santos was sentenced to more than two years in prison in August 2023.
And now today, the Chronicle reports that Santos, and the company Santos & Urrutia, have been fined $1.4 million by the City Attorney’s Office over the check fraud and permit fraud activities.
“Rodrigo Santos defrauded his clients and the City,” City Attorney Davd Chiu said in a Thursday statement. “Santos aided and abetted unauthorized excavations, creating safety hazards and putting his clients and their neighbors at risk. And, Santos profited significantly off of all of this illegal conduct. This settlement brings accountability to the matter and would not be possible without the hard work of attorneys and investigators in our City Attorney’s Office, who spent years uncovering Santos’ misdeeds.”
In addition to the $1.4 million fine, Santos “is also barred from holding an engineering license for five years,” according to Chiu’s office.
Per the Chronicle, Santos and various associates must pay $250,000 within the next 30 days, and then monthly installments of $33,571 per month over the course of the coming three years.
But all of this raises the question… Isn’t Rodrigo Santos still serving that prison sentence?
Apparently he is not. According to KQED’s report on the matter, ”Santos was sentenced to 30 months in prison in 2023, and he has since completed his sentence.”
Image: Rodrigo Santos via Facebook
