Former P&G Employee Sentenced for Defrauding Company

CINCINNATI – Susan M. Ruhe, 54, of Cincinnati, was sentenced in U.S. District Court to 21 months in prison and four years of supervised release for one count of bank fraud. Ruhe defrauded her former employer, Procter & Gamble, of more than $454,000.

Benjamin C. Glassman, United States Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio, and Yvonne DiCristoforo, Special Agent in Charge, U.S. Secret Service, announced the sentence imposed today by U.S. District Judge Timothy S. Black.

According to the Statement of Facts in this case, Ruhe was employed by Procter & Gamble, the multinational consumer goods company headquartered in Cincinnati, from July 1989 through June 2013. Her last job title was Executive Assistant in the Global Beauty Care Business Development Group. In that capacity, her primary job duties were executive travel planning, expense reporting, calendar management and the scheduling of team meetings and events.

From November 2007 through the end of her employment, Ruhe defrauded the company by requesting that the payment department issue corporate checks to be used to pay for expenses that Procter & Gamble had incurred in the ordinary course of business. In reality, she used the corporate checks to make payments on her personal credit card accounts. Both accounts were through Citibank.

To conceal her scheme, Ruhe used the email of an executive without consent to approve her requests for corporate checks. She would then designate an unwitting third party from whom she would retrieve the checks in accordance with company policy. In total, she obtained 40 fraudulent corporate checks through this scheme.

Ruhe pleaded guilty in June 2017, and as part of the plea agreement, agreed to pay $454,116.47 in restitution to Procter & Gamble.

U.S. Attorney Glassman commended the investigation of this case by the U.S. Secret Service and Assistant United States Attorney Deborah D. Grimes, who is representing the United States in this case.

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