Iowa City man convicted of defrauding California employer of $3.2 million

The newly hired CEO of Virginia Gay Hospital in Vinton has been convicted in federal court in California of defrauding his former employer of more than $3.2 million.

Euan David MacGregor, 54, of Iowa City, is no longer employed at the hospital, board spokesman John Yundt said Thursday.

Yundt noted the federal case naming MacGregor was not filed until July 2. The hospital had hired MacGregor in June.

Johnson County District Court documents show MacGregor changed his name from David Joseph Bean in 2022, saying the MacGregor name suited him better and that his family already referred to him as Euan MacGregor. The documents stated he was born in Waterloo and had lived in Scottsdale, Ariz., in the past five years.

MacGregor pleaded guilty Tuesday to one count of wire fraud, U.S. Attorney Phillip A. Talbert said in a news release following MacGregor’s plea in U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of California.

MacGregor’s sentencing is set for Jan. 28. He faces a maximum of 20 years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine. He also will likely have to pay restitution to his former employer, according to the plea agreement.

What happened

According to court documents, MacGregor, then known as Bean, used his position as a chief administrative officer to embezzle money from his employer between November 2014 and January 2020.

MacGregor in 2007 started working as a lab operations manager for a company in San Francisco that provided “medical laboratory directorship and pathology services to hospitals and clinics and operated an independent lab,” court documents stated.

By 2012, MacGregor assumed the role of chief administrative officer and was responsible for day-to-day operations, which provided financial and accounting oversight. He remained with the company until he resigned in August 2020.

MacGregor also set up a “shell” business, Essential Business Services Corp., which handled “accounting, HR and information technology“ from February 2014 through Feb. 16, 2016, when a certification of dissolution was filed in California, according to court documents.

Its principal place of business was listed as MacGregor’s home address in Benicia, Calif. He was listed as the company’s chief executive officer and chief financial officer, and his wife was the secretary of the business.

The scheme to defraud started in November 2014 and continued through July 2020 in California and elsewhere with the purpose of unlawfully taking money from the medical lab business for MacGregor’s personal gain, the court documents stated.

MacGregor also made false statements to the medical lab company, causing it to issue payments to the Essential Business Services for work he said had been outsourced to a third-party bookkeeping company.

According to court documents, between February 2015 and July 2020, MacGregor fraudulently diverted for his benefit more than $2.9 million in checks, which were initially made to the medical lab company. In addition, between November 2014 and January 2020, he fraudulently obtained about $276,250 in payments from the medical lab company to his shell company.

MacGregor also set up another shell company, Peninsula Pathology, a name similar to his actual medical lab employer, for the purpose of diverting checks to himself. He deposited those checks in two bank accounts under this shell company.

MacGregor then presented false financial information to his employer company’s president and shareholders, causing them to believe they had received funds he had actually diverted to himself.

He used the money he embezzled to pay for personal expenses for him and his family, including mortgage payments, credit card payments, educational expenses, travel and vehicles.

MacGregor was released pending sentence with special conditions that he be under the supervision of pretrial services — probation office — and limit his travel from Iowa to California only for court proceedings. He also had to surrender his passport and can’t open any new lines of credit or apply for loans.

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