A former chief investment officer of a California university pleaded guilty today to embezzling $1.7 million and laundering the funds. Kiyoshi Hatanaka told a U.S. federal district judge in Santa Ana, Calif., that, between 1999 and January 2006, he had transferred the money from Soka University of America accounts with Lehman Brothers to accounts at Los Angeles-based California Bank and Trust opened under the name of Soka but controlled by him. Hatanaka, who had accrued a gambling debt of more than $760,000, then wrote a series of checks for $10,000 payable to "cash" drawn on the accounts. He replaced the...
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