A former employee of a Danish furniture manufacturer was sentenced to state prison for embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from his company’s Soho headquarters, the Manhattan District Attorney announced. Sean Thomas, 36, was convicted in New York State Supreme Court on June 11 for stealing from Fritz Hansen, a high-end Danish furniture company with U.S. headquarters at 22 Wooster St. On June 26, Thomas was sentenced to between one and three years in prison and ordered to pay back the $229,000 he stole over a two-year period. Thomas was hired as an office manager at Fritz Hansen’s Downtown location in 2007, the New York District Attorney’s office reported. In September 2009, he opened a bank account under his middle name Judson, claiming that he still worked for his former employer Gucci. Over the next two years, Thomas falsified Fritz Hansen’s records to indicate he was paying funds to legitimate vendors when he was actually depositing money into his own account. He was caught in 2011 by an employee of the company’s Denmark office, who pointed out several bills that seemed to have been paid twice. “Embezzlement by insiders against Manhattan businesses is unacceptable,” Cyrus Vance Jr., the Manhattan D.A., said in a statement. “Sean Thomas stole from his employer 39 times over a two-year period, and even used stolen money to pay for personal expenses ranging from a vacation to Aruba to an SUV to his child’s first birthday. It appears that he only stopped because he was caught.” — Kaitlyn Meade
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