Former Gamestop vice president of corporate communications and public affairs Chris Olivera was a bad boy. For some reason, in addition to being the company’s #1 flack, he also processed invoices from vendors. Olivera has plead guilty to using his paperwork prowess to siphon money — $2-million!!! — to a dummy LLC. Here’s the scoop from the Dallas Observer:
The scheme was simple. According to a federal indictment filed yesterday afternoon, Olivera sent regular payments from Gamestop to Cloud Communications, LLC, a Nevada-based corporation with offices in Las Vegas, Lake Tahoe and Canada. The company, and its supposed representative, Jennifer Miller, existed only on the papers Olivera had filed with the Nevada secretary of state.
This went on for nearly two years, from July 2009 through April 2011.
Wow. This is like Enron / JP Morgan / Bank Melli-type crazy. While executive scumbaggery doesn’t surprise me, I naively thought that the videogame business wouldn’t suffer from a scandal like this for at least another decade. That’s totally me romanticizing the gaming business. I should know better. How about you? Any of you surprised by the Gamestop embezzling scandal?
It always starts at the top.