Prosecutor Ron O’Brien and Attorney General Mike DeWine will announce the charges this afternoon after the grand jury determined there was sufficient evidence that Kormanik stole about $41,000 from two of his wards.
Kormanik faces third- and fourth-degree felony charges and up to four-and-a-half years in prison.
In 2012, after a ward died, Kormanik made several withdrawals from the ward’s bank account totaling about $34,000, according to the indictment.
Kormanik deposited the money into his personal checking account and used the funds “to benefit himself,” according to the indictment.
In another case the indictment accuses Kormanik of transferring the remaining $7,200 of a ward’s pension into his personal account two years after the ward died.
Kormanik then gave $7,000 of that money to his wife.
O’Brien said Kormanik, 64, is expected to turn himself in at the Franklin County Jail on Friday morning.
County probate Judge Robert G. Montgomery had already removed Kormanik from about 50 cases because of questionable actions, including some of those revealed in a five-day Dispatch series in May.
That series, titled “Unguarded,” found Kormanik and several other attorneys were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars over the last few years in questionable legal fees.
The court had appointed Kormanik to oversee the care and finances of hundreds of wards throughout the last decade.
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Lawyer indicted for theft from those he was supposed to protect
5 comments:
Too many assignments and not enough monitoring.
He most likely stole from more than just two people.22
Columbus Dispatch, we continue to applaud your wonderful investigation!
When the Dispatch articles came out, I knew it was a matter of time for Paul S. Kormanik!
This is an accident waiting to happen in other states.
In Virginia, two large programs with 800 elderly and disabled clients, Jewish Family Service of Tidewater and Catholic Charities of Eastern Virginia, operate with no meaningful oversight at all.
89% of JFS of Tidewater and CCEVA cases fall outside the laughably weak oversight of the Virginia Department for Aging and Rehabilitative Services. After seven years of kicking the can down the road, the overpaid bureaucrat at DARS have only now begun the process of setting up a complaint procedure.
As for the other 89%, DARS claims that the cases are "private" and outside its jurisdiction. In fact, almost every one of those 89% were filed by or paid for by Adult Protective Services (also under DARS), the Community Services Boards, the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services, hospitals, or other public agencies that require ACCOUNTABILITY, OVERSIGHT and MONITORING.
When will DARS take its responsibility to the CLIENT seriously? After all the well-known problems with these two guardianship programs, all the shameless cover-ups, and the very real threat of lawsuits, what does DARS believe will happen if it continues to dither?
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