A Bowling Green businessman pleaded guilty Wednesday to a federal count of bank fraud.

Mark Anthony Williams, 66, entered the guilty plea in U.S. District Court after being charged with the offense in an information.

Appearing with his attorney Guthrie True, Williams acknowledged the allegations made against him by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Kentucky.

Assistant U.S. Attorney David Weiser said that Williams oversaw the Franklin Shoppes company and had a commercial construction loan with PBI Bank which enabled Williams to finance construction of a shopping center in Franklin by submitting draw requests to help pay for construction expenses.

A construction company known as S&R and its affiliates performed substantial work on the project, but Weiser said that Williams did not submit S&R invoices for payment by the bank as part of the draw requests, instead creating a company – CCC – that only existed on paper and submitting inflated invoices under that company’s name to PBI Bank for S&R’s work, court records show.

“This allowed Williams to use the CCC funds to pay for expenses related to Williams’ other unrelated projects and business interests, while S&R remained largely unpaid,” Williams’ plea agreement said.

In late 2012, with construction nearly complete, S&R was still owed more than $200,000, and Williams submitted a draw request to the bank for $204,968.33 and attached a number of unpaid invoices from the construction company, according to the plea agreement.

This work, however, had already been funded through the submission of CCC invoices, and a PBI architect involved in the project discovered the attempted double payment and advised the bank not to fund the draw request, court records show.

The federal information, which was filed last month, said that Williams knowingly submitted a draw request in the amount of $204,968.33 for expenses that had been previously submitted to and paid for by PBI Bank.

An information is a document that enables the U.S. Attorney’s Office to directly charge a person with a crime rather than present the case to a grand jury for indictment.

Under the terms of the plea agreement reached with prosecutors, Williams would be ordered to pay a $50,000 fine and be placed on supervised release for two years after spending one day incarcerated.

Williams will return to court July 18 to be sentenced by U.S. District Court Chief Judge Greg Stivers.

The statutory maximum penalties for bank fraud are a 30-year prison sentence and a $1 million fine.