For more than two decades, the chief financial officer of the Pflueger car company directed dealerships to pay for the personal expenses of father and son James and Alan Pflueger as business costs, a federal judge said Thursday.
CFO Randall Kurata had been doing that for nearly the entire 26 years he had been working for the Pfluegers, U.S. District Judge Leslie E. Kobayashi said.
The judge attributed Kurata’s actions to blind loyalty since he did not receive personal financial benefit.
She sentenced Kurata, 57, to five years of probation, during the first year of which he will be under electronically monitored home confinement. She also ordered him to pay a $40,000 fine and perform 200 hours of community service.
Kurata pleaded guilty May 18, 2012, to filing a false 2003 company tax return.
Alan Pflueger pleaded guilty on the same day to filing a false 2005 personal income tax return for failing to report as income the hundreds of thousands of dollars his company paid for his personal expenses.
When she sentenced Pflueger to 15 months in prison last month, Kobayashi said she understands that he did not start the practice, but walked into an existing culture when he took over the reins of the dealerships from his father in 2002.
Kobayashi sentenced Pflueger’s executive assistant, Julie Ann Kam, to one year of probation last month for failing to report as income money the company paid for her corrective eye surgery and car payments.
The judge is scheduled to sentence Los Angeles accountant Dennis Lawrence Duban in January for conspiracy and for preparing a false income tax return.
Kobayashi found the last defendant, James Pflueger, not guilty following a bench trial in January to criminal charges in connection with Duban’s preparation of Pflueger’s income tax returns and actions Duban took to conceal Pflueger’s profits from the sale of a commercial property in California.
