Mayor Bloomberg has at least on🌜e ju😼dge on his side.
A federal judge on Monday said it’s “highly unlikely” he’ll allow Mayor Bloomberg to testify about the massive CityTime payroll-system scam after Hiz📖zonner was served with a subpoena by lawyers for alleged mastermind Mark Mazer.
“Don’t expect him to be here unless I say so, and I don’t expect to say so,” said Manhattan federal Judge George Daniels during a hearing on the case set for trial on Oct. 15. He added that Mazer’s lawyers would have to make a really strong argument in legal papers to get him to change his mind.
Following the hearing, Mazer lawyer Gerald Shargel told the Post h🌠e wants to get Bloomberg on ༺the witness stand to discuss comments he’s made about CityTime on his weekly radio show.
“He’s discussed CityTime a number of times on the radio ♊show, and there are parts of those discussions that are relevant to the case,” said Shargel, who declined to elaborate.
Among the comments Bloomberg said over the air is that the city was “lucky” there was a massive fraud in the CityTime contract because it ended up with a giant bargain. He claimed on a July show that the embarrassing episode actually ended up saving taxpayers money to finance a new employee payroll system because the city recovered $525 million from the contractor, defense giant SAIܫC.
“That whole system cost us something like only $100 million, a🍌nd it should have been many times that. We were lucky,” Bloomberg said.
“In the end it turned out that beca🧸use of the recovery that we saved a lot of money. And it certainly works.”
Mazer remaims out of bail, but his wife, mother and cousin pleaded ♋guilty in June to helping him launder $25 million in kickbacks through the scam.
Richard Costa, a senior counsel for the city’s Law Department, said that “any testimony that the Mayor would have regarding CityTime is not relevant to any of the charges at issue in this case.”
“The Mayor’s knowledge of the development of CityTime is limited to information that he learned from other city officials in briefings and reports on the project over the course of several years,” Costa said. “The Mayor’s public statements on CityTime are similarly limited to information provided to him by other city officials.”