Former Municipal Credit Union CEO pleads guilty to embezzlement charges

Kam Wong, the former chief executive officer of Municipal Credit Union of New York, pleaded guilty this week to embezzling millions of dollars.

According to a court document from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, Wong, 62, of Valley Stream, N.Y. pleaded guilty Nov. 19 to one count of embezzlement from a federally insured credit union, which carries a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison.

As a part of his plea, Wong also agreed to forfeit and repay more than $9.8 million in restitution to the credit union. He is scheduled to be sentenced by Judge John G. Koeltl on April 5, 2019.

Neither Municipal CU or Wong’s attorney responded to requests for comment before deadline.

Geoffrey S. Berman, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, stated in the court document that Wong “abused his position of trust as a guardian of municipal, state, and federal workers’ financial accounts to enrich himself. In so doing, Wong stole money from the credit union that could have gone to the credit union’s members, and tried to cover up what he had done by making false statements to federal investigators and creating false and misleading documents.”

As reported, Wong was alleged to have committed a multitude of financial crimes while CEO of the $2.9 billion-asset Municipal CU. He previously pleaded not guilty in October.

Court documents claim that from 2013 through January 2018, Wong “engaged in a long-running multi-faceted scheme to obtain money from the credit union to which he knew he was not entitled, and took steps to seek to conceal what he had done.”

Among other things, Wong embezzled from and defrauded the credit union by submitting sham invoices for dental work which were never performed on him or paid by him, and, as a result, fraudulently obtained reimbursement for hundreds of thousands of dollars of such nonexistent dental work, the court alleged.

Moreover, the court document indicated, Wong fraudulently caused the credit union to pay him additional funds he knew he was not entitled to receive, including millions of dollars of payments in lieu of purported long-term disability insurance, and for taxes he claimed he owed on these and other employment benefits.

Wong was also accused of misusing funds from the credit unions to, among other things, receive reimbursement payments for repairs to luxury vehicles the credit union leased to him, as well as receiving cash advances to which he was not entitled. In addition, Wong even obtained controlled substances, for “personal use” from a former credit union supervisory committee member.

The court document further indicated that in January 2018, when Wong first learned that he was being investigated, he sought to “obstruct justice by making false statements to federal investigators and creating false and misleading documents to try, after the fact, to explain and justify some of these payments.”

Wong was arrested in May 2018 and subsequently terminated by the credit union in June.