39-year-old Nevin Shetty is at the centre of a big corporate fraud case. Shetty is accused of embezzling company funds when he was CFO at a Seattle firm. Shetty used up $35 million of his company’s money for a personal venture and lost most of it in 2022. This would mean a loss of well over Rs 250 crore as per currency values at the time. Shetty was hired by the company in 2021. He was fired after a year.
Nevin is accused of diverting millions of Fabric’s funds for his crypto “side business” called HighTower Treasury. This happened in February 2022.
“In March 2022, he was told he could not continue as CFO at his employer due to concerns about his performance. Shortly after he got this news, Shetty secretly transferred the funds out of the company’s account,” the indictment in US court said. Shetty transferred $35,000,100 from his company to HighTower secretly and kept this investment secret from the board and other employees.
He had planned to make a gain on the secret investment, pay the company 6 percent interest and keep the profit to himself. However, his plan backfired when almost the entire sum vanished during a cryptocurrency crash last year. In a crash triggered on May 13, the value of the investment turned nearly zero. The FBI began an investigation after the embezzlement was reported by the company.
Shetty is an Indian-origin executive who was earlier the CEO and co-founder of Blueprint Registry, which was later acquired by David’s Bridal. Shetty was born in Alabama in the US but lived in Saudi Arabia during the early years of his life. His father is an aeronautical engineer who worked with Boeing. Nevin Shetty studied at the University of Washington in Seattle. He lives in Mercer Island, Washington.
