Simi woman pleads guilty in billing scheme
She faces 8 years in prison
By Daniel Wolowicz camarillo@theacorn.com

Simi Valley resident Dolly Ann Leahy, formerly known as Dolly Barrera, pleaded guilty to one count of corporate embezzlement and two counts of money laundering last week in Ventura County Superior Court.

Leahy is expected to be sentenced in early December and could face up to eight years in state prison.

The guilty plea came after a lengthy and complicated investigation by local and federal law enforcement agents that culminated in Leahy's 2005 arrest and extradition from the Cayman Islands.

Leahy, 43, and her husband, Anthony Leahy, 46, allegedly created a phony company to over-bill Camarillo-based electronics manufacturer Power-One for $1.7 million in highly inflated parts orders.

While working as a parts purchaser for Power-One in 2002, Leahy opened a shell company called AT Components. She would buy parts for Power-One through AT Components, often marking up the prices considerably.

She placed $1.7 million in orders from Power-One between February and October 2002, when the scheme was discovered by the company's accounting department.

Randall Holliday, attorney for Power-One, said AT Components' bills came to be noticed by one of Leahy's supervisors because the unknown company had become one of PowerOne's top parts suppliers in a span of nine months.

Holliday also said the parts AT Components sold to Power-One were much more expensive than those of the firm's other suppliers. In one instance, the price for a part was 200 times higher than what Leahy paid for it, investigators said.

Leahy quit working at PowerOne the day she was asked about AT Components, Holliday said.

"Almost immediately upon being questioned, Dolly left the building and never came back," he said.

Power-One stopped payment to Leahy's fake company, but nearly $1 million had already been paid to the bogus parts supplier, according to the Ventura County district attorney's office.

When Leahy learned in October 2002 that she was being sued by PowerOne, she wired an estimated $750,000 to various offshore accounts.

Nearly three years later she was arrested in the Cayman Islands and brought back to face charges in Ventura County. Leahy's husband was arrested in May of this year when he flew from England to Las Vegas, authorities said.

Anthony Leahy is being held without bail and faces multiple embezzlement and money laundering charges. According to records, he is set to appear in court later this month.

"It was heartening to see law enforcement get behind this and, in fact, prove to these people . . . that you can run, but you can't hide," Holliday said.

Power-One is a publicly traded company expected to post nearly $500 million in revenue this year, a company official said.

In October, PowerOne acquired Power Electronics Group's Magnetek Inc. for $72 million. The company employs nearly 4,000 people worldwide.