Former School Trustee Can Not Sell Insurance

A longtime trustee of the Ventura County Board of Education was ordered Wednesday to do 800 hours community service and give up his insurance license as his sentence for stealing more than $48,000 of his clients’ money.

Superior Court Judge Lawrence Storch placed Robert G. Viles, 58, on probation, but he agreed to strike a jail sentence only in exchange for the defendant giving up his right to sell insurance.

“If he’s going to keep his license, I think he ought to go to the County Jail,” Storch said.

Viles, who ran an Oxnard insurance office, pleaded no contest to five counts of grand theft and tax fraud. Officials said he stole the money between February 1989 and December 1990 from insurance clients to shore up another failing business he owned.

Viles resigned his position on the school board within days of his no-contest plea. State law prohibits convicted felons from holding elective office.

At the sentencing hearing, Deputy Dist. Atty. Jeff G. Bennett said he was not seeking a prison term because Viles has repaid all the money he stole, mainly by relinquishing his retirement funds.

Defense attorney James M. Farley argued that Viles has suffered enough and should not have to spend 120 days in jail, as was recommended by the county Probation Department.

Viles has gone through a divorce as a result of his legal problems and now lives on $920 a month in disability and unemployment, Farley said. Viles admitted depositing his clients’ money into a personal account and falsifying a tax return to cover it up, Bennett said.

Company auditors uncovered the accounting shortages in an audit being conducted during an unrelated fraud investigation, and Viles signed a confession in April, 1991.