Maui bookkeeper sentenced to 1 year for embezzlement

The former office manager and bookkeeper of the Mountain Slope Water Inc. who embezzled more than $50,000 to fuel an opioid addiction was sentenced to a year and a day in federal prison.

Dayna Gerard-Soliven, who worked in the company’s Kahului office, also must pay $49,801.97 in restitution and a $100 special assessment and serve five years of supervised release following her time behind bars.

She was sentenced Thursday by Senior U.S. District Judge Susan Oki Mollway, who also ordered her to continue substance abuse treatment and submit to regular testing for illegal drugs.

Gerard-Soliven must report to prison by 10 a.m. July 13.

Oki Mollway recommended to the Bureau of Prisons that Gerard-Soliven serve her time at the Federal Detention Center Honolulu.

In a sentencing memo filed May 25, Gerard-Soliven’s attorney, federal public defender Salina M. Kanai, told Oki Mollway how her client’s life was upended by an accident and treatments that led to an opioid addiction.

She noted that her client deposited $10,000 back into the company’s accounts in May 2018, a month before she got caught.

“People do crazy, often criminal, things when they are addicted to drugs, especially opioids. Little matters to an opioid addict when in the desperate throes of simply needing their next hit,” wrote Kanai. “People who were formerly law-abiding and upstanding (like Dayna Gerard-Soliven) care little about the consequences of anything — family, jobs, personal safety — when the body so compulsively craves opiates to feel good or simply just normal.”

Gerard-Soliven “is well on her way to recovery,” and the chances of her recidivating “strongly decrease” as long as she is sober and supported by family. Her “total lack of criminal history, extreme remorse, and acceptance of responsibility, including a well-intentioned but clumsy attempt to try and repay the victims,” warranted a sentence of 12 months and one day, Kanai wrote.

Oki Mollway agreed.

Kanai also detailed how Purdue Pharma made billions with dangerous painkillers that “flooded the market in the 1990s.”

The dangers of their drugs were severely downplayed and were pushed hard by the “criminal enterprises of the Sackler Family,” who owned Purdue Pharma, leading to the opioid crisis that maintains its deadly grip on the country.

“Dayna is not at all suggesting that she should skate punishment for embezzling money from the blameless and innocent victims of MSW,” wrote Kanai. “But it is a bitter irony that the Department of Justice has thus far failed to criminally prosecute the Sacklers or the executives of Purdue Pharma who have been described as ‘drug dealers who put money over morality’ and ‘evil.’”

Darren W.K. Ching, who prosecuted the case for the government, and Kanai did not immediately reply to Honolulu Star-Advertiser requests for comment.

According to a criminal complaint filed March 15, 2022, Gerard-Soliven was charged with 58 counts of bank fraud and 52 counts of aggravated identity theft after she was caught.

From July 5, 2016, through May 25, 2018, Gerard-Soliven stole the identity of Mountain Slope Water Inc.’s business agent Ian Walker and made withdrawals from the company’s American Savings Bank checking account “knowing she was not entitled to the money,” according to the complaint.

Walker sold the company in November.

On 52 occasions she forged Walker’s signature or used his stamp to cash cash­ier’s checks or make withdrawals or deposits into her account using checks from the company. She was authorized to use the company’s checking and money market accounts to manage payroll.

In an Oct. 3, 2018, interview with Maui police and an agent with the U.S. Secret Service, Gerard-Soliven said her motivation “was to pay for her drug habit,” according to the complaint.

She signed a written statement admitting that between May 2017 and June 2018, she created checks that resulted in duplicate payroll payments. Walker told federal agents that “it was not his handwriting or his signature stamp was used without authorization” on the checks cashed by Gerard-Soliven.

Gerard-Soliven entered into a plea agreement in February where she agreed to waive indictment and plead guilty in exchange for the U.S. Department of Justice dropping pursuit of more charges related to bank fraud.