Honolulu (AP) – The US Grand Jury has indicted a former top prosecutor and four others in Honolulu, alleging that employees of an engineering and architectural firm bribed Keith Kaneshiro with campaign donations in lieu of the Kaneshiro prosecution of a former company employee.
Kaneshiro, Mitsunaga & Associates, Inc. The indictments of CEO Dennis Mitsunaga and three other employees of the company are in court documents that were unsealed on Friday.
They each face a conspiracy to defraud the Honolulu city and county and a former employee threatening to prevent her from exercising her rights by filing a civil rights lawsuit against the company. The first sentence carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison and the second 10 years.
Attorney Bill McCoriston, who represented Kaneshiro during the federal hearing, did not immediately make a phone call seeking comment.
The voicemail message left at Mitsunaga & Associates was not returned immediately. Attorney Sherry, who previously represented Mitsunaga & Associates employees, did not immediately call for comment.
The indictment was filed on June 2, but was not sealed after the suspects were arrested. They were scheduled to appear in court later Friday.
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It alleges that Mitsunaga & Associates employees donated more than $ 45,000 to Kaneshiro’s re-election campaign between October 2012 and October 2016, along with a lawyer listed as a non – convicted conspirator.
They enable family members, business partners, employees and contractors to make donations as well as receive personal campaign collaboration restrictions.
The former employee who targeted the prosecution was a project architect for 15 years at Mitsunaga & Associates, who was fired without explanation on the same day, she disagreed with the allegations made against her by the CEO on the same day, court documents said.
Mitsunaga met with Kaneshiro and the prosecutor’s executive assistant in October 2012, two months after the project architect filed a civil rights lawsuit against the company. Court documents show that the CEO actually tried to persuade Kaneshiro to prosecute the architect for allegedly stealing billing time for company work while she was working on unofficial side jobs.
Kaneshiro’s office prosecuted the architect, who the court documents only identified as LJM, but the judge dismissed the case in 2017 for lack of probable cause. Circuit Court Judge Karen Nakason said the documents were partly due to the arbitrary nature of the investigation and because she found that the prosecution was acting more than the recipient and way of obtaining information from Mitsunaga & Associates.
Kaneshiro took a vacation He became Honolulu’s prosecuting attorney in March 2019 after being subjected to a federal investigation. He did not run for re-election in 2020 and his term ended in January 2021.