A former CDL school owner in Philadelphia was sentenced to nearly five years in prison for bribing a CDL exam administrator to pass students who didn’t take the exam.
Vladimir Tsymbalenko, 53, who owned Vlad’s CDL School, was sentenced to four years and nine months in federal prison and three years of supervised release by U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey L. Schmehl. He was also fined $5,000.
“The last thing anyone should want on our roads are people behind the wheel of big rigs or school buses with bogus CDL certifications,” said U.S. Attorney Jacqueline C. Romero in a news release. “Licensure standards are intended to ensure that someone has the training and skills needed to safely move these huge vehicles and their cargo — human or otherwise — from Point A to Point B. As Tsymbalenko’s nearly five-year prison sentence shows, my office and our partners will work to hold accountable anyone seeking to evade such critical government regulations.”
Tsymbalenko has been incarcerated since January 2023. He pleaded guilty in October to bribing an examiner and to asking a witness to lie in the case. A sentencing memo filed in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania says that Tsymbalenko had a “terrible misunderstanding” with his former attorney, who “unfortunately told him to contact any witnesses he wanted at trial,” which Tsymbalenko did, apparently not realizing how it would be perceived.
Charging documents say that Tsymbalenko scheduled his clients to take the exam with a specific, unidentified examiner who didn’t test the students, sometimes granting them passing scores despite not testing. The test administrator admitted to an FBI agent that Tsymbalenko paid him more than $10,000 between 2015 and 2018 in exchange for giving his students passing scores.
The examiner told investigators that he received more than 50 payments from Tsymbalenko.
Another witness told investigators that he sent messages to clients at Tsymbalenko’s direction and that Tsymbalenko charged between $3,500 and $4,500 to guarantee a CDL.
A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office didn’t immediately respond to a FreightWaves inquiry about the case.
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