Courier-Journal: Felner indicted on charges of misusing federal grants
The press conference will be live here.
Former University of Louisville Education Dean Robert Felner has been indicted on charges of fraudulently obtaining nearly $2.3 million in grant money from University of Louisville and University of Rhode Island.
A federal grand jury in Louisville charged Felner, 58, with 10 counts of mail fraud, money-laundering conspiracy and income-tax evasion.
The 45-page indictment says that Felner and Thomas Schroeder, 58, of Illinois, took $1.7 million from the Rhode Island school and about $576,000 from U of L, and attempted to embezzle another $240,000 from U of L.
Felner, who resigned from U of L earlier this year, also allegedly failed to report $1.6 million in income from 2002 to 2007 and allegedly owes $500,000 in federal taxes, U.S. Attorney Dave Huber said in a news release.
Huber scheduled a 1 p.m. news conference to talk about the indictment, which will be streamed live on www.courier-journal.com.
The investigation was disclosed in June, when Felner was set to take a job at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside.
Felner has been the subject of months of scrutiny in the news media, including stories in The Courier-Journal and on WHAS-TV about how he had helped get a doctoral degree in one semester for a former California school superintendent who two years earlier had given Felner’s center a $375,000 contract.
The university appointed a panel to investigate.
President James Ramsay, who dismissed 31 complaints from faculty and staff about Felner as “anonymous crap” in a television interview, later withdrew that characterization and apologized to the faculty.
The newspaper reported that at least a half-dozen faculty members, using their names, complained about Felner to the administration and that at least four said they had to hire lawyers to fend of harassment from him.
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