The former managing partner of one of the state’s largest accounting firms admitted in state court that he created fictitious companies and employees, and phony correspondence and contracts, and doctored invoices and other documents in order to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars in false reimbursements from his own company.
Patrick Oki testified last week that he did so because “I felt like I had been underpaid for at least a couple of years. And based on the partnership agreement, I’m entitled to that share of profit based on my ownership percentage.”
He said he had the money classified as reimbursement, not as earnings due to the company, and had it counted as a part of his share of company profits so as not to cause any harm to the firm, its employees, its clients and the other partners.
Oki, 47, a certified public accountant and certified fraud examiner, is on trial in state court on 13 counts of theft, money laundering, forgery and using a computer to commit the theft and money laundering. According to the indictment against him, Oki stole $503,897 from PKF Pacific Hawaii LLC between January 2011 and January 2014.
For the years 2010 through 2014, and counting the alleged theft amount as part of his share of company profits, Oki said he was still underpaid by $919,477 while his four partners were overpaid by more than $1.7 million, according to calculations he made after he was indicted in April 2015.
The indictment lists the other partners — Lawrence Chew, Deneen Nakashima, Dwayne Takeno and Trisha Nomura — as complainants. They later left the firm. In October 2015 new partners executed a buyout agreement with Oki and changed the name of the firm to Spire Hawaii LLP.
Oki said that in late 2010, just months after the partners created PKF, he called a meeting to complain that the monthly $28,000 he was receiving was too low.
Oki said he concocted various schemes to collect the money he believed was owed to him, “because I did not want my partners to know how much I was getting compensated.” He said their partnership agreement included a provision that precluded the partners from knowing each other’s level of compensation.
One of the schemes involved the supposed buyout of Hawaiian Cement and Ameron Hawaii by Sumitomo Osaka Cement Co. Ltd. of Japan. Oki admitted that no such deal was in the works. He said he created a company he called AMC Associates that was supposed to provide legal and translation services to Sumitomo. He also said he lifted a signature from the internet and pasted it onto an AMC document.
Oki said he later told his partners the Sumitomo deal fell through because a PKF employee had leaked information about the proposed buyout. He also had PKF’s law firm, Goodsill Anderson Quinn &Stifel, draft a settlement document to indemnify Sumitomo from any responsibility and expenses related to the failed deal. The lawyer who drafted the document says he doesn’t know whether the law firm’s representation of PKF is part of Oki’s criminal case.
The address Oki listed for AMC Associates is a mail-forwarding company in Connecticut. When Deputy Prosecutor Chris Van Marter referred to AMC as a fake company, Oki bristled, saying companies can exist only on paper. On a document for another company Oki created, he said he signed the name Ernie Harrison. When Van Marter called it a phony signature, Oki said it was his, real signature of Ernie Harrison.
Testimony in the nonjury trial ended Thursday. Circuit Judge Rom Trader is expected to render his verdicts in the coming weeks.
