Earlier today, at the federal courthouse in Central Islip, Kwesi Bovell, the former chief financial officer (CFO) of The Mulholland Group, a real estate company in Manhasset (“Mulholland”), was sentenced by United States District Judge Joan M. Azrack to 60 months’ imprisonment and ordered to pay restitution of $3.45 million for embezzling millions of dollars from his employer over the course of three years.
Jacquelyn M. Kasulis, Acting United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, and Michael J. Driscoll, Assistant Director-in-Charge, Federal Bureau of Investigation, New York Field Office (FBI), announced the sentence.
“To fund a lifestyle of extravagance and opulence, the defendant plundered his employer’s company from the time he was hired until his fraud was discovered three years later, and with today’s sentence, he is punished for his avarice and betrayal,” stated Acting United States Attorney Kasulis. Ms. Kasulis thanked the FBI for its investigative work on the case.
According to court filings, Bovell began embezzling funds shortly after he was hired in 2015 to be the CFO of Mulholland. As CFO, Bovell had signature authority over numerous bank accounts of Mulholland and its subsidiaries. Over the next three years, Bovell fraudulently transferred over $3.5 million from Mulholland to Southgate Holdings, a company controlled by Bovell.
Bovell spent most of the stolen funds on luxury purchases for himself and others. Those expenses included a $66,000 ring, vacations, $500,000 to a woman with whom he was in a relationship, an additional $500,000 into a laundromat business operated, in part, by that woman, approximately $90,000 to another woman for whom he rented an apartment in Manhattan, $722,000 on a failed gym, Evolution Fitness, in Suffolk County, as well as purchases at Brooks Brothers, Cartier, Chanel and Gucci. According to Mulholland, at least $1.5 million remains unaccounted for.
The government’s case is handled by the Office’s Long Island Criminal Division. Assistant United States Attorneys Charles P. Kelly and Madeline O’Connor are in charge of the prosecution.
The Defendant:
KWESI BOVELL
Age: 36
Valley Stream, New York
E.D.N.Y. Docket No. 18-571 (JMA)
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