Padraig Naughton, the former financial controller at the Irish-founded NYC construction firm Navillus, has been handed jail time and a fine after being convicted of fraud alongside Irish siblings Donal O'Sullivan and Helen O'Sullivan in 2021.
Naughton, 50, has been sentenced to one year and one day in prison for each of the 11 counts he was convicted of in 2021, to be served concurrently.
He was also sentenced to two years of supervised release, with conditions, for each of the 11 counts he was convicted of in 2021, also to be served concurrently.
During the sentencing in New York on June 27, Judge Pamela Chen further imposed a $100 special assessment fee on each count, for a total of $1,100.
Naughton, who has the right to appeal, was ordered to appear for his prison sentence on November 13 of this year.
Now a US citizen, Naughton emigrated to the US in 1998 after obtaining a visa in the green card lottery. He and his wife have been married since 2004 and have two children together. The family is based in New York.
Naughton had been released on a $250,000 bond and on the condition that he could travel to New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut without prior approval, and to the Poconos and Florida with prior approval from Pretrial Services.
Court records show that Judge Chen granted four requests from Naughton's team to modify his conditions of release. Among the exceptions, Naughton was permitted to travel to Ireland in February 2022, citing his elderly father's ill health in Co Tipperary, and in February 2023, he was permitted to renew his expired US passport on the condition he would surrender it upon receipt.
Naughton was formerly the financial controller at one of NYC's largest constructions firms Navillus, which was founded in 1987 by brothers Donal, Leonard, and Kevin O'Sullivan after they emigrated from Co Kerry in the 1980s.
In July 2020, Naughton, along with siblings Donal O'Sullivan and Helen O'Sullivan, were indicted on charges that they schemed to avoid making more than $1 million in payments to union benefit funds between 2011 and 2017. Donal is the founder, owner, and President of Navillus, while his sister Helen was the Treasurer and payroll administrator.
The three stepped down after their arrest, issuing a statement that they had “no choice but to commit ourselves to clearing our names.”
In October 2021, an NYC jury found Naughton and the O'Sullivan siblings guilty on all 11 counts charging wire fraud, mail fraud, embezzlement from employee benefits funds, submission of false remittance reports to union benefits funds, and conspiracy to commit those crimes.
The District Attorney’s Office said at the time: “Navillus was a signatory to multiple collective bargaining agreements that required the company to make contributions to union benefits funds, such as health, pension, and vacation funds, for all ‘covered work’ performed by its workers at construction sites.
“Between 2011 and 2017, the defendants engaged in a scheme to avoid making these required contributions by placing some of Navillus’s workers on the payroll of another company (the 'Consulting Company.') The Consulting Company then issued weekly paychecks to those Navillus workers for work they did on Navillus construction jobs.
“To conceal the scheme from benefits fund auditors, the defendants caused the Consulting Company to issue fraudulent invoices to disguise the fact that the funds Navillus had issued to the Consulting Firm were made to reimburse the Consulting Company for the wages the Consulting Company had paid to Navillus workers.”
Breon Peace, US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said upon the verdict: “As found by the jury, the defendants deliberately devised a fraudulent scheme to avoid making required contributions to union benefits funds on behalf of Navillus’s workers, in order to deprive the workers of benefits they had earned and deserved.”
Donal O'Sullivan and Helen O'Sullivan are due to be sentenced this Friday, June 30. They could each face up to 20 years in prison.
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