The former finance chief of a wallpaper company has been ordered to pay back over $1 million she embezzled from the firm.
Tina Feuerstein, who previously worked as CFO of York Wallcoverings, received the sentence in federal court in Illinois on Tuesday. She will also serve three years in federal prison, per the terms of the sentence handed down by LaShonda Hunt, a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.
In a superseding indictment filed in March, Feuerstein was charged with eight counts of wire fraud. A jury returned a guilty verdict about a month later. Per the indictment, Feuerstein misappropriated a total of $1,090,020 from York Wallcoverings using a company American Express card for personal purchases. That included spending on “groceries, utility bills, trips, merchandise, furniture, luxury handbags, and other expenses incurred by herself, her husband, and her children,” the document said.
She went on to conceal such purchases from personnel at both York Wallcoverings and its Evanston, Illinois-based parent company Industrial Opportunities Partners, the indictment said. She did so by “hiding those expenses within York Wallcoverings’ automated accounting system so that those expenses were not readily visible to other York Wallcoverings personnel,” the document stated.
Feuerstein used the company’s Amex card to make purchases at Michael Kors, Coach and Harley-Davidson, according to the indictment.
When she was convicted in April, prosecutors said she hid more than 3,800 credit card charges.
This was not apparently Feuerstein’s first brush with embezzlement; prosecutors said she had also previously embezzled more than $200,000 while working in the accounting department of another company.
In a sentencing memorandum, Assistant U.S. Attorneys Jared Hasten and Anne Yonover said that “the public needs to know that there will be serious consequences when professionals, like defendant, commit crimes such as embezzlement.”
John Somerville and Steven Shobat, who were listed as defense attorneys for Feuerstein, didn’t respond to a request for comment sent Thursday, nor did representatives from Industrial Opportunity Partners. A spokesperson for York Wallcoverings previously told sister publication CFO Dive that the company does not comment on “individual employment matters or ongoing or concluded legal proceedings.” On Friday, a representative for York Wallcoverings said the company has no new statement to offer.
