Investors Suing NYU Student for Fraud May Have Paid for Renovation of Hall
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Investors suing an New York University student indicted in an alleged bank fraud scheme may have unwittingly bankrolled the renovation of a lecture hall on the Washington Square campus.
The theater-style classroom, in a building at 19 W. 4th St., opened in the current semester and is named after Omer Bulent Yalincak and Ayferafet Yalincak. They are the Turkey-born parents of Hakan Yalincak, the NYU senior charged with depositing counterfeit checks totaling $43 million.
The Omer Bulent and Ayferafet Yalincak Family Foundation pledged in the fall to donate $21 million to NYU’s General Studies Program at the School of Continuing and Professional Studies. The money was supposed to pay for a “permanent home” for NYU’s general studies program, a professorship in Ottoman studies, a lecture series, and the classroom renovation. The foundation has given NYU only the first installment of the pledge, $1.25 million – money that may be tied up in the alleged hedge-fund scheme involving the donors’ son.
The parents were named as defendants in a civil suit filed by two East Coast investors, who accuse them, along with their son and another business partner, of operating a phony hedge fund and owing the plaintiffs almost $2 million.
The civil complaint against Mr. and Mrs. Yalincak alleges that some of the money invested by the plaintiffs, Arthur Cohen and Joseph Healey, was donated to NYU. It alleges that $1 million was wired from an account holding money the plaintiffs invested to an account managed by the parents, a day after NYU says it received the $1.25 million installment.
Hakan Yalincak, who was arrested Friday, is in federal custody in New Haven, awaiting a bond hearing scheduled for Thursday morning. He could face a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison. A lawyer representing Mr. Yalincak in the criminal case, Mickey Sherman, said, “I don’t know if there’s any connection,” between the pledge made by the parents and the alleged bank fraud.
A spokesman for NYU, John Beckman, said the university would return the donation from the family foundation if the money was determined to be “ill-gotten.”
