Crime & Safety
Former Ross Valley Sanitary District GM Returned from Philippines, Booked into Marin County Jail
Richards, whose whereabouts had been unknown since June 2012, was sought on a $1 million warrant surrounding a $350,000 housing loan he received from the district, allegedly inappropriately.
More than two weeks after he was arrested in the Philippines on allegations that he diverted $350,000 in public money loaned to him for housing and then fled the country, former Ross Valley Sanitary District general manager Brett Richards was brought back to Marin and booked into county jail Saturday.
Richards, 45, faces charges of embezzlement and money laundering and is being held on $1 million bail. He was arrested on July 11, according to officials with the Marin County District Attorney’s Office, who said they used Richards’ financial records to track him to the Philippines.
The Philippine Bureau of Immigration and the Philippine National Police arrested Richards was in Moalboal, a municipality in Cebu, Philippines. After his arrest, he was temporarily housed in Cebu City before he was transported to the Philippine Bureau of Immigration detention-processing center in Manilla.
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Richards, whose whereabouts had been unknown since June 2012, was sought on a $1 million warrant surrounding a $350,000 housing loan he received from the district, allegedly inappropriately.
In September 2012, Richards was living off the radar but started publishing posts on the blog Ross Valley Sewer Truth. He told Patch at the time that he had been thinking about creating the blog for a while.
Find out what's happening in San Anselmo-Fairfaxwith free, real-time updates from Patch.
The blog, which has since been taken down, outlined, in first person, how Richards became the general manager for the RVSD in 2008 with a $197,000 annual salary. The blog never mentioned Richards’ name, but did call out several local leaders and was full of jabs at the Central Marin Sanitation Agency and other organizations, including the city of San Rafael.
Officials with the Ross Valley Sanitary District, which serves Fairfax, San Anselmo, Ross, Greenbrae and Larkspur, picked a new interim general manager in January 2013.
Finding an interim general manager took nearly six months for the sanitary district, which didn’t hire a head hunting consulting firm for the search.
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