A former Benicia man on Tuesday pleaded guilty to embezzling $3.2 million from his former employer, a U.S. Department of Justice official said.
Euan David MacGregor, formerly known as David Joseph Bean, 54, of Iowa City, Iowa, entered a plea in a Sacramento federal courtroom to one count of wire fraud for defrauding his former employer out of the cash, U.S. Attorney Phillip A. Talbert said in a press statement issued Wednesday.
According to court documents, between November 2014 and January 2020, MacGregor, then known as Bean, used his position as a chief administrative officer to embezzle money from his South San Francisco employer.
MacGregor defrauded his former employer in two ways, noted Talbert, who leads the DOJ’s Eastern District of California.
First, he diverted at least 122 checks made payable to his employer to bank accounts that he controlled. MacGregor did it by creating a shell corporation that had a business name similar to the name of his employer, then deposited the checks into bank accounts that he opened using the name of the shell corporation. MacGregor then presented false financial information to the company’s president and shareholders, causing them to believe they had received the money he diverted.
In addition, MacGregor falsely told his employer that he was outsourcing his employer’s bookkeeping work to a third party, a company named Essential Business Services, another company that he created and controlled.
His false representations caused his employer to pay Essential Business Services “thousands of dollars each month for bookkeeping services that it did not perform,” Talbert added in the news release.
MacGregor used the money he fraudulently obtained to pay for personal expenses for himself and his family. They included mortgage payments, payment of credit card bills, educational expenses, travel, and the purchase of vehicles.
The case stems from an investigation by the FBI. Assistant U.S. Attorney Shelley D. Weger leads the prosecution.
MacGregor is scheduled to be sentenced by U.S. District Judge John A. Mendez on Jan. 28, when he faces a maximum prison term of 20 years and a $250,000 fine. The actual sentence, however, will be determined by the court and federal sentencing guidelines, which take into account a number of variables, noted Talbert.