Simi man pleads guilty to felony embezzlement charges
Scheme bilked Camarillo company out of $1 million
By Daniel Wolowicz camarillo@theacorn.com

Anthony Leahy pleaded guilty last week in Ventura County Superior Court to multiple felony charges stemming from a 2002 billing scheme that swindled PowerOne, a Camarillobased electronics manufacturer, out of nearly $1 million, authorities said.

Leahy, 47, whose charges include, embezzlement, money laundering and tax evasion, is scheduled for sentencing in early February.

Leahy's wife, Dolly Ann Leahy, pleaded guilty in November to one count of corporate embezzlement and two counts of money laundering in connection with the same case.

Originally scheduled to be sentenced late last year, she faces eight years in prison when she returns to court Jan. 25, according to court records.

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

Leahy, 46, and his wife, 44, created a phony company to overbill Power-One for $1.7 million in parts orders.

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

Randall Holliday, attorney for PowerOne, said in a November interview that the scheme came to the company's attention during an internal audit of the firm's vendors.

Holliday said the parts purchased from AT Components 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 actually paid for it, investigators said.

Dolly Leahy quit working at Power-One the day she was asked about AT Components, Holliday said. Soon after, Power-One stopped payment to the shell company, but nearly $1 million had already been paid to the bogus parts supplier, according to the Ventura County district attorney's office.

Dolly Leahy wired an estimated $750,000 to various offshore accounts in October 2002 after learning that Power-One had moved forward with a lawsuit against her.

Power-One employs nearly 4,000 people worldwide.