Embassy accountant stole ‘hundreds of thousands’ from US military in Haiti, feds say
A local employee of the United States Embassy in Haiti is accused of stealing “hundreds of thousands of dollars” from the U.S. military in a scheme that went on for years, according to a federal indictment.
The indictment says Roudy Pierre-Louis forged paperwork for cash advances by members of the United States Southern Command, known as SouthCom. The scheme ran from 2015 until August 2018, federal prosecutors say.
A judge in Charleston, South Carolina, issued an arrest warrant for the Haitian national Wednesday. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Charleston charged Pierre-Louis with 16 counts of fraud, including wire fraud and forgery.
Pierre-Louis does not have a lawyer listed in court records.
According to the indictment, Pierre-Louis worked for 14 years as the only budget analyst in the U.S. Embassy in Haiti’s Security Coordination Office. The job put Pierre-Louis in charge of all accounting on the program for the Department of Defense and the U.S. State Department, investigators said.
The scheme worked by Pierre-Louis forging signatures of high-ranking people in the Department of Defense on cash-advance forms for Haitian nationals, the indictment alleges. He would then mark off the expenses as “office supplies” on SouthCom’s budget, according to court filings.
A LinkedIn account associated with Pierre-Louis lists his location as Dumfries, Virginia, about 30 miles south of Washington, D.C. His online resume notes he stopped working at the embassy in Haiti in August 2018, which is when the indictment said the scheme ended.
His LinkedIn account says he had worked for the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince since 2001.
