ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA (BNO NEWS) – A former bank employee was sentenced to over 2 years in prison for helping a co-conspirator to steal $17 million from bank, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Washington said on Friday.

Sissaye Gezachew, 32, of Springfield, Virginia, worked as an assistant vice president-senior credit analyst at United Bank during the time frame of the scheme. From 2007 to 2009, he assisted Ossama El-Atari, 31, of Ashburn, Virginia, to defraud the United Bank among others throughout the U.S.

Gezachew supplied El-Atari with fraudulent documents, including a fraudulent tax return, and setting up fake domain names and e-mail accounts from his co-conspirator to submit to the bank in support of the fraudulently obtained loans.

In December 2007, El-Atari and Gezachew discuss a $5 million loan sought by El-Atari to buy additional steakhouses in Maryland. However, Gezachew informed him that his balance sheet did not add up.

El-Atari acknowledged that his purported collateral, his life insurance policy, was false too. The former bank employee offered to help El-Atari "tighten up" his documentation. After that, El-Atari used the same procedure to obtain loans from six different banks in Virginia, Ohio, Tennessee and Maryland.

Initially, Gezachew was paid $150,000 for his assistance which caused nearly $18 million in fraudulent loans from United Bank. In the other occasions, El-Atari paid him in increments of $5,000 to $9,999 for falsifying other documents.

Overall, El-Atari stole over $53 million from the banks thanks to the documents manipulated by Gezachew which fraudulently claimed that the steakhouse owner had more than $20 million in life insurance policies.

Gezachew was sentenced to 30 months of imprisonment (2 and half years) and was also ordered to pay $18 million in restitution to United Bank. El-Atari was previously sentenced to 144 months in prison (12 years) for operating the fraud scheme.

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