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Accountants Behaving Badly: Sexually Assaulting Children, Guilty Plea In Visa Fraud Case, A Roudy Theft

Plus, U.K. accountant charged with misleading pensions regulator, and an Isle of Man chartered accountant is banned.

Accountant, 57, and his boyfriend, 56, are jailed for total of 30 years after sexually assaulting children as young as 11 while they filmed their sick acts [Daily Mail]
Asswipes.

Richard Townsend, 57, abused children as young as 11 and even filmed his partner Mark Metcalfe, 56, sexually assaulting a teenage boy who was was ’15 at most’.

The pair, from Southampton, were convicted of a total of 17 offences spanning a decade from 1996 to 2006.

Townsend was convicted by a jury of 14 counts including rape, indecent assault, indecency with a child and assault by penetration, and was jailed for 23 years.

Southampton Crown Court heard over the course of several years he abused two boys – one aged from 11 to 15 and another from 13 to 16 – as well as an unknown male.

Richard Townsend

Townsend is a convicted sex offender, having being handed a suspended sentence in March 2018 after admitting to encouraging the distribution of indecent images and making indecent images of children.

Metcalfe was convicted of two sexual assaults and one indecent assault and was jailed for seven years.

Ex-Diamond Bar accountant pleads guilty in visa fraud case [MyNewsLA.com]
Young Shin Kim, a former accountant from Diamond Bar, CA, pleaded guilty on Dec. 9 to a federal count of conspiracy to commit visa fraud for his role in a scheme to obtain lawful permanent resident status for South Korean nationals by submitting fraudulent visa applications that falsely claimed American businesses wanted to hire skilled foreign workers.

A sentencing hearing was scheduled for Feb. 24, 2020.

Kim and licensed California attorney Weon Keuk Lee, who were indicted by a federal grand jury last month, exploited the EB-2(a) visa program by submitting bogus Alien Worker Petitions on behalf of companies—some legitimate, some created specifically for the scheme—that purportedly wanted to hire foreign nationals after exhausting attempts to find suitable workers in the U.S.

According to court documents, those South Korean visa applicants paid between $30,000 and $70,000 to Kim and Lee in the hopes of obtaining a visa.

Embassy accountant stole ‘hundreds of thousands’ from U.S. military in Haiti, feds say [Miami Herald]
Roudy Pierre-Louis, who worked for 14 years as the only budget analyst in the U.S. Embassy in Haiti’s Security Coordination Office, is accused of stealing “hundreds of thousands of dollars” from the U.S. military, according to a federal indictment.

Roudy Pierre-Louis

Pierre-Louis forged paperwork for cash advances by members of the United States Southern Command, known as SouthCom. The scheme ran from 2015 until August 2018, federal prosecutors say.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Charleston, SC, charged Pierre-Louis with 16 counts of fraud, including wire fraud and forgery, on Dec. 11.

Pierre-Louis forged signatures of high-ranking people in the Department of Defense on cash-advance forms for Haitian nationals, the indictment alleges. He would then mark off the expenses as “office supplies” on SouthCom’s budget, according to court filings.

Accountant charged with misleading pensions regulator [FT Adviser]
Paul Rewrie was charged on Dec. 12 with misleading The Pensions Regulator (TPR) after he allegedly failed to enroll staff into a pension.

Rewrie, 58, was charged with knowingly or recklessly providing false or misleading information to TPR, an offence under section 80 of the Pensions Act 2004 which carries an unlimited fine at a magistrates court.

He could face an unlimited fine or up to two years in prison if found guilty.

The regulator alleged Rewrie, the sole director of U.K. accounting company PR Finance And Development Ltd., falsely declared staff at a Cambridge-based company had been automatically enrolled into a workplace pension scheme, despite knowing they had not.

Theft case accountant banned [Isle of Man Today]
Phillip McCarthy, a chartered accountant jailed for stealing more than £500,000 from his employer, was disqualified from acting as a company officer by the Financial Services Authority (FSA).

McCarthy, a resident of Colby, Isle of Man, was jailed in August 2018 for three years and four months for offenses carried out while working as finance manager and company secretary at yacht services company Dohle. He was also a director and company secretary of Vantage Corporate Services Ltd.

McCarthy was released from custody in November 2018, having served his time on remand.

He was banned by the FSA for eight years.

West Palm Beach tax preparer handed six-year sentence [Palm Beach Post]
Olry Maurival, a tax preparer in West Palm Beach, FL, was sentenced to nearly six years in prison last week for filing false tax returns that cost the U.S. Treasury roughly $700,000.

Olry Maurival

Maurival, 47, who operated Glory Marketing and Financial Services, was also ordered to pay restitution to the IRS.

He was convicted by a federal jury in Fort Lauderdale in September of conspiracy to defraud the United States, five counts of aiding and assisting the preparation of false tax returns, and two counts of making and subscribing a false tax return.

In addition to claiming phony deductions for clients of his West Palm Beach business, he also lied on his personal tax returns, federal prosecutors said.