Ex-Vinton hospital CEO sentenced to over 3 years for defrauding previous employer

The former chief executive officer of a Vinton hospital — who worked there only a month last year before being indicted on federal charges for defrauding another former employer of over $3.2 million — was sentenced last week to over three years in prison.

Euan David MacGregor, 54, formerly known as David Joseph Bean, of Iowa City, pleaded last August to one count of wire fraud in U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of California. He was hired in June 2024 as the CEO of Virginia Gay Hospital before being terminated a month later after he was indicted in July.

MacGregor, who was sentenced last Tuesday in California, also was ordered to serve over two years of supervised release following his prison term and must pay more than $3.2 million in restitution to his victim, according to court documents.

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

Fraud scheme

According to court documents, MacGregor, then known as Bean, used his position as a chief administrative officer of a California company 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” corporation, 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 CEO 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 the company had received funds he actually had 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, court records show.

This case was investigated by the FBI.

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