MARTINEZ — A former employee of a Filipino food company pleaded no contest to financial crimes in a scheme to embezzle $1,399,342.84 from her employer, prosecutors announced Friday.
Mary Antoinette Narvaez Hernandez, 60, pleaded no contest on Thursday to grand theft, identity theft, money laundering, and tax evasion, as part of a plea deal with Contra Costa prosecutors. In return she’ll be sentenced to a year in county jail, with the potential to serve it on house arrest, as well as a seven-year suspended sentence and three years of probation.
Hernandez was the accounting manager at Ramar Foods International, a food company based in Pittsburg. She embezzled the funds over a five-year period starting in 2016. She also failed to pay $97,568 in state taxes, according to prosecutors. The president of the company, Susie Quesada, spoke at Hernandez’s sentencing hearing, lamenting how her former employee’s time at the company was “tainted by deception and lies,” prosecutors said in a news release.
“It is for our employees, who like our family, were betrayed by her deception and thievery, that we applaud the myriad law enforcement professionals and this court for bringing her to justice,” Quesada said, according to the news release.