Fay Beydoun, a prominent Metro Detroit businesswoman, has been charged with 16 criminal counts in a legislative earmark scandal stemming from her use of a $20 million grant she secured in the state budget in June 2022.
Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office filed charges against Beydoun after a nearly two-year-long investigation. She is charged with larceny by conversion, uttering and publishing and conducting a criminal enterprise, according to an affidavit filed Monday by Nessel’s office in 47th District Court in Farmington Hills.
Beydoun is a longtime mover and shaker in Metro Detroit business and Democratic political circles.
The criminal charges stem from her use of the $20 million grant the Legislature awarded for an international business accelerator program that didn’t exist when it was added to the state budget on June 30, 2022.
Beydoun’s Global Link International was formed in the days following the grant’s inclusion in the state budget for the 2023 fiscal year. She later became CEO of the not-for-profit organization and was paid an annual salary of $550,000, according to records obtained by The Detroit News.
At the time of the budget approval, Beydoun was the longtime executive director of the American Arab Chamber of Commerce, a position she held from August 2008 to May 2023, according to her LinkedIn profile.
The American Arab Chamber’s chairman, Ahmad Chebbani, told The Detroit News that Beydoun was supposed to be pursuing the $20 million grant on behalf of the chamber as an economic development initiative for the Dearborn-based business organization.
The award of the earmark to Beydoun’s Global Link International came as a shock to the Arab chamber because the group believed Beydoun had been working to obtain the grant for the chamber’s own innovation hub, Tejara, according to Chabbani.
Beydoun also ran Tejara from March 2002 to May 2023, according to her LinkedIn profile.
Beydoun left her position at the American Arab Chamber after The News first reported on the grant in March 2023. In November 2023, Whitmer announced that Tejara had been selected for a $3.4 million competitive grant through the Small Business Support Hubs program.
In 2019, Whitmer appointed Beydoun to the Michigan Economic Development Corporation’s executive board and the state’s Commission on Middle Eastern American Affairs.
In 2020, while serving on the MEDC executive board, Beydoun began pitching the global business accelerator to MEDC executives internally, according to records obtained by The News. Other meetings took place over the summer of 2021.
Beydoun was elected second vice chair for the Michigan Democratic Party in 2021, the same year she hosted a fundraiser for Whitmer’s reelection committee at her home in Farmington Hills. She also served on the Whitmer campaign’s Women for Whitmer Leadership Council in 2022.
Beydoun finally secured the grant in the 2023 fiscal year state budget on June 30, 2022, when lawmakers added nearly $1 billion in earmarks for pet projects to the state budget.
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Who is Fay Beydoun? An Oakland County businesswoman engulfed in scandal
Reporting by Chad Livengood and Beth LeBlanc, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
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