GREENVILLE COUNTY, S.C. -- A Greenville County woman is going to prison after pleading guilty to stealing millions from her employer to finance her shopping addiction.
Brenda Rivard pleaded guilty to eight counts of breach of trust and two counts of credit card fraud. The crimes took place between January 1998 and December 2005 when Rivard was CFO of Lube USA. Rivard stole the money by transferring more funds than necessary into the payroll account. She would then spend the excess money by writing herself checks from the payroll account. She also spent about $180,000 using the corporate American Express card on personal items, most notably purchased from Nieman Marcus.
Lube USA is a privately-owned company headquartered in Japan that was formed in 1987. The company makes lubricating equipment for the manufacturing industry. The Greenville company is a distributor of the company. Prosecutor Sylvia Harrison said, "She then falsified the bank statements that were sent back to Japan. They had no idea that she was taking this money."
Investigators said that about $2.89 million was stolen over an eight-year period. They found 2,400 articles of clothing, about 850 pairs of shoes and 412 pieces of jewelry stored in Rivard's basement.
Rivard's husband said that his wife bought all the things she did to compensate for what she didn't have. John Rivard said, "I believe the freedoms of a normal life without diabetes, the inability to have children, et cetera, have left a void in her life."
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