Former Flextronics worker guilty of $1.3M theft

A former employee of Flextronics, an electronics manufacturer, was found guilty of stealing at least $1.3 million in company funds and received a prison sentence, California’s attorney general said.

Richard Schwalbe was convicted on two counts of grand theft for diverting money owed to his employer into personal accounts. He worked at the time as a credit manager for Solectron, an electronics manufacturer that was acquired by Flextronics in 2007.

In an unrelated case last year, a senior business development executive at the company was charged and arrested by the FBI for selling confidential sales forecast data and iPhone product information to a market research company.

In the more recent case, the California Attorney General said in a statement that Schwalbe was sentenced to two years and eight months in prison. He was first arrested on Jan. 26 last year, and pleaded no contest to the charges on June 24 of this year.

An investigation found that Schwalbe used his position at Solectron to personally collect over $800,000 owed to the company, then renegotiated separate debts owed by another company to have them paid into an account he controlled.