PEKIN, Ill.—After two years, the federal case against a former CEO at Tazewell County School Employees Credit Union accused of using forgery to misapply a half-million dollars of the $25-million CU’s funds is coming to trial.
“This is not a complicated case,” a federal prosecutor told U.S. District Court Judge James Shadid on Friday in Peoria when he opposed a request for an eighth continuance in the case against Charles Juska.
Pretrial preparations, however, have become difficult enough to force Shadid to push Juska’s trial from its latest date on Feb. 8 to May 16, the Journal Star reported.
Juska, 53, remains free on bond until then.
His attorney, Joel Brown, said that Juska will testify in his own defense, and Brown expects to use some of the prosecution’s own evidence and witnesses to counter its case in the expected week-long trial, the newspaper said.
Juska was indicted in May 2014 on 10 charges alleging he “willfully misapplied about $550,000” in funds kept by the Tazewell County School Employees CU, where he served as president for 17 years before his departure in December 2010.
As in many cases of small CU fraud, Juska is alleged to have forged signatures to create loans for customers without their knowledge, then used the proceeds to cover other customers’ delinquent loan payments.
He created loans for members not eligible and failed to verify the value of collateral cited in loan applications, some of which didn’t exist, according to the indictment. Juska also concealed delinquent loans from the credit union’s board of directors, sometimes by issuing new loans for members to make payments on their delinquencies, the charges allege.
The indictment did not state whether Juska profited from his alleged crimes or how much in assets the credit union lost through them. Brown told Shadid that evidence the U.S. District Attorney’s Office is sharing with him in the pretrial discovery phase includes about 15,000 pages of documents, some of which he received recently. The documents, he said, include information he expects to use “to exonerate my client,” the Journal Star reported.