NEW YORK, NY – Lars Winkelbauer, former Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice President of Polar Air Cargo Worldwide, Inc., has been sentenced to four years in prison for his role in a decade-long fraud scheme that resulted in over $32 million in losses to the company. U.S. District Judge Jesse M. Furman handed down the sentence following Winkelbauer’s guilty plea to charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering.
U.S. Attorney Damian Williams stated, “Lars Winkelbauer abused his high-level position at Polar for over a decade, extracting millions of dollars in kickbacks for himself and causing tens of millions of dollars of harm to the company. The substantial sentence imposed today sends an important message: corporate corruption doesn’t pay.”
The scheme, which ran from approximately 2009 through July 2021, involved Winkelbauer and at least nine other individuals, including three senior executives and six vendors of Polar. These parties engaged in accepting kickbacks and secretly owning interests in Polar vendors to secure favorable business arrangements.
Winkelbauer, 48, from Bangkok, Thailand, personally received over $6 million in kickbacks from about 11 different Polar vendors or customers. He also engaged in a sophisticated money laundering operation to hide these illegal payments, involving falsified invoices and the use of shell companies in China.
In addition to his prison term, Winkelbauer has been sentenced to three years of supervised release and is ordered to forfeit $6,774,039.30. He must also make restitution amounting to $32,902,847 to Polar Air Cargo Worldwide, Inc. This case highlights significant corruption within the senior management of Polar, affecting nearly every aspect of the company’s operations for more than a decade.