Cracking down on deadbeat businesses isn’t as easy as new plans might suggest.
Those who owe money sometimes dispute it. Take the case of downtown L.A.’s Prestige Parking Inc., which owes a whopping $65.2 million, far more than any other company.
Last month, Prestige’s owner, Sohrab Sahab, was sentenced to 525 days in jail and 10 years probation for multiple convictions of failing to file parking occupancy tax forms and to pay the parking tax to the city.
In a recent interview with the Business Journal, Sahab said he has been wrongly targeted. He claims the city assessed him for parking lots that he neither owned nor leased.
“Those locations are not even mine,” Sahab said. “There are no parking structures or parking lots on many of these locations.”
Sahab said he hired an accountant to negotiate with the city, but city officials broke off negotiations soon after. He claims they wanted to make an example out of him.
“They took the position they wanted me out of business,” Sahab said.
City officials would not comment on the case beyond an Aug. 21 press release from the office of City Attorney Carmen Trutanich announcing Sahab’s sentence. The next step is a restitution hearing in October. The City Attorney’s Office is also pursuing him in civil litigation.
Meanwhile, another parking lot owner who allegedly owes taxes to the city also said he has been assessed for parking taxes at locations that weren’t his responsibility.
Mike Sabet, president and owner of Unified Parking Service of Pasadena, which operates 21 parking lots in the city of Los Angeles, said the city has assessed him parking taxes at an address where there’s an office building, not a parking lot.
“The city says I operated a surface parking lot there for five years, which is clearly impossible,” Sabet said. “Yet every time I attempt to point out the mistake to the city, they ignore it.”
He said he owes the city $150,000 in taxes each year and has paid.
Sabet also claims that the city calculates that more cars are parked on spaces within the lots Unified operates than is possible.
“Not only are they assessing me for lots that I do not operate, but they are overassessing me for the spaces in the lots that I do operate,” he said.
Sabet said he has received calls or letters from six collection agencies.
“I started writing letters to them saying they have the wrong guy, but after a while, I just gave up on that,” he said.
Officials in the city’s Office of Finance and City Attorney’s Office declined to comment on Sabet’s case, citing pending litigation.
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