One of the companies apparently most disrupted by the 1994 San Fernando Valley earthquake was Van Nuys-based Kenfil Distribution Inc, but it now appears that Kenfil may have over-egged the pudding somewhat. Irwin Bransky was president and Nelson Landman a vice president at the time of the earthquake, and they are now charged with defrauding Kenfil’s insurers by making out that the damage was much worse than it really was, and getting them to pay for software that hadn’t been selling well. It’s hard to believe they though word of such behavior wouldn’t get around, but they allegedly ordered employees to damage the software packages by jumping on them, stamping on them and by bending them with their hands over a two-day period, according to words in the indictment cited by the Wall Street Journal. Having duly inflicted copious earthquake damage, Kenfil, which was acquired later in 1994, filed claims with its insurance company seeking over $5m and $840,000 was apparently paid before the alleged fraud was discovered.
