Schirmer sentenced in Polar fraud case
30 / 08 / 2024
Photo: Carlos Yudica/ Shutterstock
Former Polar Air Cargo employee Robert Schirmer has been sentenced to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty last year to taking part in a scheme to defraud the US cargo airline out of millions of dollars.
Ex-executive Schirmer pled guilty last October to one count of conspiring to commit wire fraud and honest services wire fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. He was initially scheduled to be sentenced on February 13.
Following his prison sentence, reported by Bloomberg, Schirmer will undergo supervision for three years.
After pleading guilty last year, Schirmer also agreed to pay forfeiture of $983,759.32 and to make restitution of just over $9.3m to New York-based Polar.
Schirmer was one of 10 people charged in April 2023 with defrauding Polar, 51% owned by Atlas Air Worldwide and 49% owned by DHL Express.
The 10 defendants involved in the case were accused of taking part in a fraud scheme that operated for over a decade and resulted in the company losing an estimated $52m, while impacting nearly all operations. The scheme allegedly saw relations with GSAs, freight forwarders, handling and trucking service providers corrupted.
The fraudulent activity is understood by law officials to have spanned at least in or about 2009 through to about July 2021.
Former Polar Air Cargo chief operating officer Lars Winkelbauer was in May sentenced to four years in prison for his part in the fraud scheme.
And in January, former vice president of operations, system performance, and quality Carlton Llewellyn pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to commit wire fraud.
Alongside Schirmer, Llewellyn and Winkelbauer, there is one other co-defendant that was a senior executive of Polar. There are also six co-defendants that owned and operated various Polar vendors and customers.
Speaking to Air Cargo News at the CNS Partnerships Conference in Dallas earlier this year, Kersti Krepp, senior vice president and chief commercial officer at Polar Air Cargo said that the business has now moved on with an entirely different management team in place.
