Former Chinatown Bank executive sentenced to prison for embezzlement

LOS ANGELES (CNS) – A former executive at a downtown Los Angeles bank was sentenced Friday to three years in prison for embezzling more than $700,000 of his employer's funds.

Sammy Sims, 61, of West Covina, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong, who also ordered him to pay $306,849 in restitution, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

Chinatown-based Eastern International Bank hired Sims in September 2017 as the lender's chief financial officer. As a condition of employment, Sims agreed not to use the bank's confidential information for his personal benefit or the benefit of others. The bank's policy also required Sims to promptly disclose any conflict or appearance of conflict with the bank's interests.

Prosecutors said that between August 2018 and October 2020, Sims transferred $86,000 in bank funds to the U.S. Treasury and the California Franchise Tax Board to make federal and state income tax payments for him and his wife. Sims concealed the transactions by creating false entries in the bank's ledger claiming the payments were intended for the bank's tax accounts, prosecutors said.

In April 2019, Sims sent approximately $14,161 in bank funds to a debt collection agency to help pay off a debt he had incurred. Sims hid the transaction by creating a false entry in the bank's ledger indicating the payment was for data processing software, prosecutors said.

Sims admitted that between April 2019 and December 2020, he took approximately $113,264 in money belonging to the bank to pay balances on his personal credit card.

From February 2020 to April 2021, Sims also lied to several bank employees that they needed to change bank-funded life insurance policies due to their age, but the policies were obtained through the intermediary for Sims' wife, a licensed life insurance broker who received a commission for each policy she sold, prosecutors said.

For some employees, Sims obtained their personal identifying information and used that information to purchase life insurance policies from his wife. Sims used a checking account owned by the bank to wire approximately $311,608 of the bank's money to several life insurance companies to partially pay policy premiums, prosecutors said.

When Sims was later questioned about life insurance policies opened using the bank employees' personal information, he lied, saying the employees' identities could have been stolen via a cybersecurity hack or through unauthorized disclosures by the bank's personnel department, according to prosecutors. Sims resigned from the bank shortly after being confronted over the life insurance policies.