Dive Brief:
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Mark Anthony Gyetvay, a former CFO of Russian natural gas company Novatek, was sentenced to more than seven years in prison for a scheme to hide millions of dollars of income in undisclosed Swiss bank accounts and submitting a false filing with the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. Department of Justice said Thursday.
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Gyetvay was also ordered to serve three years of supervised release and to pay a $350,000 fine and about $4,021,074 in restitution to the U.S., the DOJ said in a press release.
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A federal jury in March convicted Gyetvay, a Florida resident, of failing to file a Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts, making a false statement to the IRS and willfully failing to file tax returns. He was found guilty of concealing his ownership of more than $93 million in offshore assets and failing to file and pay income taxes from 2005 to 2015.
Dive Insight:
Gyetvay became the CFO of Novatek after working as a certified public accountant in the U.S. and Russia, according to the Thursday release. Beginning in 2005, he opened two different accounts at a bank in Switzerland, which at one point had a combined value of more than $93 million, it said.
He was accused of taking steps over a period of several years to hide his ownership and control over these funds, including removing himself from the accounts and making his then-wife, a Russian citizen, the beneficial owner.
Despite being a CPA, Gyetvay did not file his 2013 and 2014 U.S. tax returns, DOJ said. Neither did he file required Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts reports to disclose his control over the Swiss bank accounts, at times rejecting his accountant’s recommendation to do so, the department said.
In an effort to avoid substantial financial penalties, he made a false Streamlined Foreign Offshore Procedures filing with the IRS, which is available only to taxpayers whose failure to report offshore assets and income is due to non-willful conduct, according to prosecutors.
Gyetvay could not immediately be reached for comment.
