Store owner pleads guilty in $2.5M gas scam
A South Texas convenience store owner could be sent to prison for making more than $2.5 million in fraudulent charges on credit cards belonging to an oil field services company.
Barkat Ali Panjwani — a 57year-old who lives in San Antonio’s Stone Oak neighborhood but owns Catarina Food Mart in tiny Catarina in Dimmit County — pleaded guilty in August to one count of wire fraud for charging Florida-based KLX Energy Services for thousands of bogus gas purchases.
Seven other wire fraud counts are to be dismissed as part of his plea deal.
Sentencing was scheduled for Tuesday, but U.S. District Judge Fred Biery postponed it until May at the request of Panjwani’s lawyer, Margot Bianca Gallegos.
KLX, which has some operations in Houston, discovered a series of suspicious charges made at Panjwani’s store in 2019, according to a sentencing memorandum filed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Harris.
The memorandum said $2.54 million was charged to the company from three Wex credit cards used at Catarina Food Mart between Feb. 9, 2019, and Nov. 6, 2019. KLX had assigned the cards to two company vehicles located in Odessa in West Texas and a third in Oklahoma City. But both Odessa vehicles had been “offline” in 2019, and the Oklahoma City truck hadn’t been driven to South Texas that year, the memo said.
KLX employees searched the vehicles and discovered that the Wex cards were missing.
An FBI investigation found the cards were used to make 2,521 unauthorized charges.
“Panjwani ran Klx-issued Wex cards multiple times a day for thousands of dollars a day without any gas having ever been pumped intoany vehicle,” Harris wrote. “Panjwani kept the money that Wex transferred into CFM’S Prosperity Bank account and used it for his own purposes.”
Probation officers recommended in a pre-sentence report that the judge hand down a sentence between 27 and 33 months. But Gallegos asked the judge for probation for Panjwani, saying his likelihood of recidivism was low.
“He has genuine contrition and shame and he accepted the plea offer timely,” Gallegos wrote. “Mr. Panjwani accepts full responsibility for his actions. Given Mr. Panjwani’s age and family ties, the likelihood of him ever re-offending is miniscule and he does not want to be in the court system again.”
Panjwani’s wife, Leticia Castaneda Ochoa, and supporters also asked the judge to be lenient.
Ochoa described Panjwani’s courtship of her in a letter to Biery, saying she was a single mother with three children when they met. Panjwani’s persistence in pursuing Ochoa won her over. They have been together 17 years, married the last six, and had a son together.
She said Panjwani is a doting father and grandfather who drops off and picks up his children from their schools, barbecues at weekend get-togethers and provides for the family.
“Our family will not survive without him and he is a good man with a very big heart,” Ochoa wrote. “He will be of great use to our community and our family out here with us.”
But prosecutor Harris said in his memorandum that Panjwani hasn’t been entirely cooperative and has made only $50,000 in restitution payments to date.
The prosecution seeks a sentence of 27 months, the bottom end of the recommended guidelines.
“While Defendant has admitted guilt and has agreed to make restitution, he has not been totally forthcoming on how he committed the offense, specifically how he obtained both the three cards, which according to KLX had not been in Texas since well before the offense, and the necessary personal identification numbers to complete the charges,” Harris wrote.
“He claimed that two to three employees of KLX provided him with the Wex card numbers and PINS to make the charges, but he was unable to provide the names, phone numbers, or any identification of these KLX employees,” he added. “Defendant claimed to have split the money 60/40 with the unidentified individuals by paying them in cash, although there is no evidence to support this.”