United States District Judge Beth L. Freeman has sentenced former Apple employee Dhirendra Prasad to three years in prison, while also ordering him to pay over $19m in restitution for defrauding the tech giant of more than $17m and for related tax crimes.
Ex-Treasury intelligence officer Irene Kenyon shared a link to the Northern District of California’s Department of Justice news release on Prasad’s sentence via Twitter:
Prasad, who worked as an Apple buyer from 2008 to 2018, exploited his position to facilitate kickbacks, steal parts, inflate invoices, and cause Apple to pay for products and services it never received. To further rile the feds, Prassad also evaded taxes on the proceeds of his schemes.
According to the DOJ’s sentencing memo, Apple handed Prasad “substantial discretion to make autonomous decisions to benefit his employer.”
accepting salary and bonuses from Apple valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Instead, Prasad abused the company’s trust to enrich himself while accepting salary and bonuses valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars. Knowing how Apple worked from the inside gave Prasad the means to keep his scamming ways undetected.
On Wednesday, Prasad’s shady past returned home to roost, with Judge Freeman also ordering him to forfeit over $5.4m in assets, pay an additional forfeiture money judgment of $8.1m, plus serve three years of supervised release. This is all on top of the restitution order to pay Apple and the IRS over $17m and $1.8m, respectively.