The former chief financial officer for a downtown Los Angeles-based affordable housing developer is set to be arraigned Friday on a federal charge of taking advantage of funds allocated to assist the homeless.
Cody Holmes, 31, of Beverly Hills, faces a mail fraud charge allegedly linked to millions of dollars in grant money paid by the state to Shangri-La Industries — where Holmes was CFO — for the purchase, construction and operation of homeless housing in Thousand Oaks, in Ventura County.
According to the complaint, the state paid $25.9 million in funds from Homekey — a California program that aims to convert properties such as motels into affordable housing — to Shangri-La. Holmes allegedly submitted fake bank records to the California Department of Housing and Community Development to prove the developer could complete the projects for which it had applied for grants, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
But prosecutors contend the bank accounts that Shangri-La and Holmes said contained $160 million did not exist.
According to court papers, Holmes and Shangri-La also sent the state balance sheets falsely contending that Shangri-La-affiliated entities held millions of dollars in cash. After the documents were submitted, the state housing agency paid millions of dollars more in grant money to Shangri-La for, among other things, the never-completed Thousand Oaks project.
Prosecutors contend some of the money paid to Shangri-La was used to pay credit card bills for American Express accounts linked to Holmes. In 2022, more than $2.2 million was transferred from a Shangri-La account to a Holmes-controlled account, after which more than $2 million was paid toward American Express cards that had been used to make purchases at various luxury stores, court papers allege.
Holmes’ attorney could not immediately be reached for comment.