Mayor Bloomberg has at least one judge on his side.
A federal judge on Monday said it’s “highly unlikely” he’ll allow Mayor Bloomberg to testify about the massive CityTime payroll-system scam after Hizzonner was served with a subpoena by lawyers for alleged mastermind Mark Mazer.
“Don’t expect him to be here unless I say so, and I don’t expect to say so,” said Manhattan federal Judge George Daniels during a hearing on the case set for trial on Oct. 15. He added that Mazer’s lawyers would have to make a really strong argument in legal papers to get him to change his mind.
Following the hearing, Mazer lawyer Gerald Shargel told the Post he wants to get Bloomberg on the witness stand to discuss comments he’s made about CityTime on his weekly radio show.
“He’s discussed CityTime a number of times on the radio show, and there are parts of those discussions that are relevant to the case,” said Shargel, who declined to elaborate.
Among the comments Bloomberg said over the air is that the city was “lucky” there was a massive fraud in the CityTime contract because it ended up with a giant bargain. He claimed on a July show that the embarrassing episode actually ended up saving taxpayers money to finance a new employee payroll system because the city recovered $ 525 million from the contractor, defense giant SAIC.
“That whole system cost us something like only $ 100 million, and it should have been many times that. We were lucky,” Bloomberg said.
“In the end it turned out that because of the recovery that we saved a lot of money. And it certainly works.”
Mazer remaims out of bail, but his wife, mother and cousin pleaded guilty in June to helping him launder $ 25 million in kickbacks through the scam.
Yahoo Local News – New York Post
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