Pfaff will be sentenced by U.S. District Judge Richard Berman on Nov. 16.
According to the criminal indictment, Pfaff and his co-conspirators defrauded UMDA of the “honest services” of former officers and directors, including former UMDA president Michael Grandinetti, who pleaded guilty in Jan. 2007 to making false statements to federal prosecutors regarding the secret side payments, Peter Sinclair, and Joseph Waechter.
Earlier this year Pfaff, a former executive of KPMG LLP, received 97 months in prison and was fined $3 million by the same court in U.S. v. Stein, a case billed as the largest criminal tax fraud prosecution in the nation’s history.
Judge Lewis Kaplan said Pfaff’s crimes in that case were “so raw, so brazen, so outrageous” that they clearly “passed the line” into criminality.
Pfaff is also one of the defendants in a pending civil suit brought by UMDA in the CNMI Superior Court to recover millions of dollars for harm done to the company over a 10-year period ending in 2006 when Pfaff was a director and shareholder in the company.
The trial date for this case, which was filed in April 2007, has not yet been scheduled.
