Ex-Credit Union Manager Sentenced to More Than 14 Years in Federal Prison for $40M Embezzlement that

[TexasTowelie]

Ex-Credit Union Manager Sentenced to More Than 14 Years in Federal Prison for $40 Million Embezzlement that Made Institution Insolvent


LOS ANGELES – The former manager of CBS Employees Federal Credit Union was sentenced today to 169 months in federal prison for a two-decade-long embezzlement that caused the credit union a loss of $40 million – a scheme that ultimately led to the financial cooperative being forced into insolvency.

Edward Martin Rostohar, 62, of Studio City, was sentenced by United States District Judge Otis D. Wright II.

Rostohar pleaded guilty on May 20 to one count of bank fraud. He used his position as a manager at the credit union, a federally insured financial institution, to make online payments from the credit union to himself or by forging the signature of another credit union employee on checks made payable to himself.

Prior to his three decades of employment at the credit union, Rostohar was a trained accountant and an examiner at the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA), a federal agency that regulates credit unions. During his approximately 20 years of embezzling from CBS Employees FCU, he used his senior position at the institution to falsify its records to hide his fraud and make credit union appear to be profitable despite it suffering more than $40 million in losses as a direct result of his scheme.

The scheme was exposed in March when a credit union employee, after discovering a $35,000 check payable to Rostohar, conducted an audit and discovered approximately $3.8 million in checks made payable to Rostohar between January 2018 and March 2019. Rostohar told law enforcement he gambled away much of the money and spent the rest on traveling by private jet, buying expensive watches, and giving his wife a weekly allowance of $5,000. Rostohar also started a coffee business in Reno, Nevada in December 2018, and he wrote tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of checks to himself to cover the business’s costs as well as to pay a $5,000 monthly mortgage on a home in Reno he recently purchased.

Read more: https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/ex-credit-union-manager-sentenced-more-14-years-federal-prison-40-million-embezzlement

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. How sickening. How many lives were ruined by his greed?

I can't help but wonder which party he belonged to.

I hope he dies in prison.