Three more senior employees at Pilot Flying J have decided to face the music and sign plea agreements for their part in the alleged Pilot Flying J fuel rebate scheme. They join their other colleagues who signed agreements late last month, bringing the total number of guilty pleas up to 5 so far.
The employees were all in managing positions. Jay Stinnett and Kevin Clark were both regional sales managers while Holly Radford was a regional account representative. According to the plea agreement, Clark said that he “deceptively withheld rebate amounts from Pilot Customers” by reducing his customers’ rebates by two to three cents per gallon “without the customers’ knowledge.”
All three have plead guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit mail fraud. Clark and Radford both face up to five years in federal prison and fines of up to $250,000.
Stinnett on the other hand has a harsher future to face. Since he was in charge of helping to train the sales team and instructed them on how to implement the alleged scheme, he is being held even more accountable than his associates. Stinnett faces up to 20 years in prison, a fine of up to $150,000 and may be personally responsible for paying restitution.
According to Ashley Judd, one of the two PFJ employees who entered into a plea agreement last month, Clark had signed off on checks that she had written, knowing that they shorted the client out of the rebates that they deserved. As Judd confessed, Clark fell. Now that Clark and the others have plead guilty and have agreed to testify against other PFJ employees, what will their confessions reveal?
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Rick Smith says
“what will their confessions reveal?”
How about how they rip of the drivers consistenetly
on Pilot Points?
I haven’t been OTR for years but they ripped me off
left and right when I was.
Ktowner says
This is just starting. Jimy can keep claiming he didn’t know anything about this, but with every guilty plea, that claim gets harder and harder to believe. anyone that believes that the president/ceo of a company where this kind of theft was happening for years, didn’t know it was happening needs to refresh their memories about tne Enron scandal fron a decade ago.
Ted Savage says
I personaly know that I have caught “mistakes” several times on my personal account when I noticed after fueling that my points had gone down by a penny a gallon on the amount of gallons I had just purchased instead of going up by a penny a gallon. A person could say well thats only a $1.50 on my 150 gallons I just bought, but if you do that to 100,000 purchases per day plus you short the companies 2 or 3 cents per gallon per transaction per day the govenor’s family is able to pay all of their employee’s wages each day at no cost to the Haslem family. This is my belief, and to believe that the top end of the scale does not know that they are receiving all of this extra money into their personel bank accounts is quite the stretch.
Dennis says
I quit using FlyingJ when they started charging me credit card price for debit card. Glad to see they are going to pay the piper although to little to late.
Dana says
Watch with the plea deal they all end up serving just a few months at best, hell I”ll serve six months sittin on my hands for multi millions in the bank, any day of the week any takers?.
Chesley says
That’s true about the points being shorted. I started keeping close track of my points last year when things just didn’t seem right. I would call corporate and complain and they would say it was some computer glitch and give me my points. With several million drivers being shorted I wonder how much money Pilot pocketed.
CA Medicine Woman says
The only way Jay Stinnett can be held forced to pay restitution to those customers harmed is if he is a corporate officer or corporate board member, unfortunately. Otherwise, the only recourse for those harmed (financially) is against the corporation (PFJ), which can tie things up in court for many years. Hence why so many businesses incorporate, to protect those at the top from civil liability when the humans at the corporation decide to harm others in order to protect and boost profits.
The corporation can, in turn, force a case such as this into class action status, in order to dramatically reduce any potential civil judgment to just pennies on the dollar. The corporation can also avoid ANY civil liability whatsoever if no corporate officers or board members can be proven to be responsible.
It isn’t even reasonable to expect that anyone harmed by these people will see a penny. Those who manage to get a judgment can only collect on it for 10 years. The fines will be considered a priority lien over any judgment liens for those harmed, and ANY lien is subject to a limit of 25% of income earned. Since those going to prison will be unable to find a job that pays anything significant, even the government will be lucky to see a fraction of the fines, everyone else will have to be content with the written judgment (trust me, they won’t see a penny).
You have to love it, and people keep fighting to keep such rules in place, and expand upon them, with every penny they spend with the corporation.