MIAMI – An accountant working for a luxury furniture store on Miami’s Biscayne Boulevard embezzled more than a half-million dollars from the business, leading to her arrest Tuesday, according to police.
Police said Anette M. Martinez, 59, of southwest Miami-Dade, was hired as an accountant at Morada Haute Furniture in January 2021. The international furniture company was located at 3701 Biscayne Blvd. at the time and is now located at 2480 Biscayne Blvd. in Miami’s Edgewater neighborhood.
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According to an arrest report, a $526,800 series of wire transfers to banks in Indonesia and Poland in May and early June of 2021 caught the attention of the company’s owner — because the company’s only international suppliers are based in Italy.
Police said Martinez told the owner that she “received the invoices and simply paid them” although the owner told police he has previously told her that he needed to approve all transactions.
They said the third-party payment processer attempted to contact Morada Haute Furniture’s owner in order to verify the transactions, but Martinez told the company were accurate and to proceed with the payments.
Martinez denied any wrongdoing in an interview with Miami police detectives, the arrest report states. She faced three grand theft charges and was released from the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center on a $10,000 bond.