However Associate Justice Kathleen M. Salii found Timothy Uehara also known as Tero Uehara not guilty of 43 counts of grand larceny and 42 counts of false pretenses.
The sentencing was set for March.Uehara was charged with 92 counts of criminal charges for rental payments her received from tenants of the first floor of the waiting house at T-Dock in Meketii which was not turned over to the Koror State Public Lands Authority.Justice Salii in finding Uehara guilty of perjury said in her six-pages order dated January 23 that evidence clearly stated that defendant signed or authorized his signature on the financial disclosure statements averring that he had no reportable sources of income from non-government employment.The Justice said that Uehara’s ethics certification turned out to be false because at the time he signed these financial disclosure statements, Uehara was collecting money from various tenants of the property for four years.The Justice in finding Uehara guilty of misconduct in public office said that defendant perjured himself by filing in false financial statements to the Ethics Commission on January 15, 2002, January 28, 2003 and November 14, 2005 while in office as a public official.In finding him not guilty of the grand larceny and false pretenses, the Justice said that the court is not convinced that beyond reasonable doubt that all the elements of the counts of grand larceny were established.The Justice added that the government “failed to meet each element of proof beyond a reasonable doubt that defendant did obtain lease payments of at least $22,000 under false pretenses by falsely representing or implying that he owned the property he was accepting rental payments from, with intent to defraud the owner.”Uehara, a legislator of the Koror State government, was doing business as Four Seasons, a retail business on the ground floor of the T-Dock Waiting House.His application for business license was approved by the KSPLA and sometime after KSPLA approved the lease, defendant began sub-leasing the property to others between 2001 to 2004.The government charged the defendant and alleged that defendant fraudulently took money which should be returned to the Koror State Government or Koror State Public Lands Authority.The court stated that no written lease was ever submitted into evidence.
