Detroit businesswoman Fay Beydoun is collecting a $550,000 annual salary from taxpayers as she continues to defy the state’s efforts to recoup a shady $20 million legislative grant.

Beydoun, a former Michigan Economic Development Corporation appointee of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Democratic donor, disclosed her annual salary in draft memo included with a package of documents she sent the state last month detailing grant spending for the last quarter of 2024, The Detroit News reports.

“Her salary of $550,000 is in line with compensation to executives of other international organizations with similar missions and budgets,” Beydoun wrote in the document obtained by The News.

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The news site notes Beydoun’s paycheck is roughly three times larger than Whitmer’s.

The recent report details how Beydoun is spending a $20 million grant she received from the Michigan Legislature in 2022 for Global Link International, a nonprofit business accelerator she founded 11 days after lawmakers approved the funding.

At the time, Beydoun was appointed by Whitmer to the executive committee for the MEDC that oversees business incentives, but she was forced to relinquish that role in April when The News exposed how she was spending the first $10 million tranche of the grant.

About $800,000 spent through December 2023 included expenses for a $4,500 luxury coffeemaker, an $11,000 first-class plane ticket to Budapest, more than $40,000 in furniture, and $408,000 in salary for two people over three months.

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Other concerns arose from claims Beydoun initially pursued her grant on behalf of the American Arab Chamber of Commerce she headed, before steering the money to Global Link, a nonprofit that didn’t yet exist.

About a month after Beydoun left the MEDC amid the blowback on Global Link’s spending, she sent a letter to Whitmer vowing to “wind down” the nonprofit.

The scrutiny, along with an FBI referral that forced Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel to launch an investigation, made it “challenging to impracticable” for Global Link to carry out its mission, Beydoun wrote in the letter cited by The News.

The documents she submitted to MEDC for the last quarter of 2024 included a memo suggesting Beydoun has since reversed course on the wind down and continues to spend taxpayer cash.

MEDC hired the Lansing-based Sentinel Law Group in November to help the agency deal with Global Link, The News reports.

In total, Global Link has spent about $2.8 million, with $361,740 in expenses in the fourth quarter of 2024, while the AG investigation into the nonprofit remains ongoing.

Last year, Democratic majorities in the House and Senate included budget language that attempted to claw back Beydoun’s grant and others included in billions spent on business incentives deals in recent years, but that budget language was later removed.

Voters elected a Republican majority in the House in November that’s now preparing to investigate the Global Link grant and the Whitmer administration’s taxpayer-funded business deals more broadly.

“We are hiring a number of lawyers and investigators, people with prosecution experience and people with investigative experience,” House Speaker Matt Hall, R-Richland Twp., said last month. “We are not messing around. We are going to get to the bottom of misspending of government funds and also departments that are blatantly breaking the law.”

State Rep. Steve Carra, R-Three Rivers, told The News he’s ready to get to work as the chairman of the oversight Subcommittee on Corporate Subsidies and State Investments.

“I’m excited to hear more about this and to hear what Fay Beydoun and the MEDC have to say,” Carra said. “I think the taxpayers of Michigan deserve to know.

“Hopefully, we can have them as guests sometime soon to talk about it further.”

The scrutiny on corporate subsidies is one element of an overarching focus on increasing transparency in the Republican-led House that will also comes with new rules for pork projects, which includes the end of earmarks for for-profits, detailed grant sponsor information, stricter non-profit eligibility, conflict of interest protections, and public notice of funding requests.

“Taxpayers deserve to know exactly where their money is going, why it’s being spent, and how it benefits the public,” said Rep. Ann Bollin, R-Brighton Township, chair of the House Appropriations Committee. “Under our new process, every dollar in these initiatives will be properly vetted and held to the highest standards of transparency.”