College of Business Administration : Midwestern State University

By Times Record News
April 10, 2007

Thursday night's Streich Family Lectureship on Free Enterprise at Midwestern State University will feature former federal prison inmate Walt Pavlo, founder and president of Etika, LLC.

His talk, titled "Ethics and White Collar Crime," will be at 7 p.m. in the J.S. Bridwell Auditorium of the Dillard College of Business Administration. It will be followed by a reception at 8 p.m.

In January 2001, in cooperation with the federal government, Pavlo pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering and was sentenced to prison.

Also on Thursday, Pavlo will give a talk on "Pressure Performance" at a program sponsored by MSU, Resource Wichita Falls and the Small Business Development Center. The program will be at 7 a.m. at the Silver Room of Wells Fargo Bank in Parker Square.

Then Pavlo will give a talk on "The Importance of Mentoring" at 7:45 a.m. Friday at the Wichita Club. It is being sponsored by MSU and Partners in Education.

As a senior manager at MCI, and with a meritorious employment history, Pavlo was responsible for the billing and collection of nearly $1 billion in monthly revenue for MCI's carrier finance division. Beginning in March 1996, Pavlo, one member of his staff and a business associate outside MCI began to perpetrate a fraud involving a few of MCI's customers. When the scheme was completed, there had been seven customers of MCI defrauded over a six-month period, resulting in $6 million in payments to the Cayman Islands.

His case appeared as a feature in the June 10, 2002, issue of Forbes Magazine just weeks before WorldCom divulged that it had over $7 billion in accounting irregularities.

Pavlo formed Etika (which means ethics in Slovakian) in 2005 after leaving prison. Since leaving prison, he has been invited to speak at the top business schools in the country, major Fortune 500 companies, federal law enforcement training facilities and a number of professional societies.