[kaiserthrive.org editor: Yet another Kaiser Fraudster gets off easy. This time it's Henry Mead Kaiser -- former Kaiser board member and grandson of Kaiser Permanente founder Henry J. Kaiser -- over swindling a California company out of $25 million. Kaiser's lawyer argued that the light sentence would "send a message about the possibilities of redemption," however one of our regular readers writes about the message this slap on the wrist really sends: "This article makes me want to go out, steal $25 million, lose $2 million, turn on my cohorts, and serve my year in jail. If you add up the salaries of Kaiser and his wife in the article they still earn $100k plus a year. But somehow you are supposed to feel sorry for this a-hole because he is renting?" And CorpHQ asks: "I wonder...if the prosecutor had looked into the eyes of a low-income person of color, would he have thought 'this guy gets it'?" We think not.]

From the AP, via Business Week Online:

By AARON C. DAVIS
Associated Press Writer

Judge gives Kaiser heir light sentence

AUG. 22 10:33 P.M. ET — A former director of Kaiser Hospitals was sentenced Tuesday to one year and one day in jail for his role in a scheme to misappropriate $25 million from a California telecommunications company.

Henry Mead Kaiser, the grandson of Henry J. Kaiser, the industrialist who formed the nation’s largest health maintenance organization, faced three years or more in jail, but a judge ordered a reduced sentence after Kaiser took steps even prosecutors called extraordinary to begin atoning for his crimes.

“I looked him in the eye and thought, ‘This guy gets it.’ He was genuinely remorseful,” said prosecutor R. Steven Lapham in explaining one of the reasons he did not seek the maximum sentence for Kaiser, who pleaded guilty to interstate transportation of money obtained by fraud and conducting a monetary transaction in criminally derived property.

Kaiser, 62, and a father-son team, Larry Wells and Jeffrey Wells, repeatedly transferred $25 million back and forth between SureWest Communications and a venture capital company, Quivira Ventures, owned by the elder Larry Wells and Kaiser.

The transfers allowed Quivira to demonstrate to potential investors that it had sufficient funds to qualify for various funding proposals, Lapham said.

Kaiser spent the past two years cooperating with police to prosecute his co-defendants after his 2004 arrest.

Kaiser resigned his high profile jobs as director of Kaiser Hospitals and Health Plans and as a trustee of the Kaiser Family Foundation. He canceled his country club memberships, sold his family estate and put the money in a court registry to compensate SureWest, Lapham said. After that, Kaiser and his wife moved into a modest rental unit in Oakland where for the past two years they have lived mostly off his wife’s $40,000 receptionist salary while Kaiser volunteered with nonprofit groups.

In his sentencing memo, Kaiser’s lawyer, Matthew Jacobs, pleaded for a light jail term. He said Kaiser’s sentence could “send a message about the possibilities of redemption.”

“He deeply regrets what he did because it was wrong, and grossly inconsistent with his values,” Jacobs wrote.

U.S. District Judge Morrison C. England ordered Kaiser to surrender on Oct. 22. His co-defendants will be sentenced on Oct. 10.

According to prosecutors, Jeffrey Wells, a senior treasury analyst for SureWest, began wire transfers of $25 million to Quivira in 2003 without SureWest executives’ knowledge.

To conceal the scheme, Kaiser admitted Quivira would return the misappropriated funds to SureWest periodically so auditors would not discover the funds were missing. Wells, however, would later return those funds to Quivira, Lapham said in a statement.