A former executive for MoviePass Inc. was found guilty on Thursday of embezzling at least $260,000 from the subscription service and its parent company, Helios & Matheson Analytics, to repay debts incurred by producing a marketing event at the Coachella music festival in 2018.
Khalid Itum, now 43 years old, was found guilty by a jury of two counts of wire fraud. He was acquitted on two counts of money laundering. The Department of Justice announced the verdict Friday afternoon.
At the time, Itum was the VP of business development at the New York-based MoviePass. He later reached the role of executive VP, which he held until departing the company in March 2019 — around the time that the all-you-can-watch subscription-based movie theater ticketing service collapsed financially after losing hundreds of millions of dollars.
The case stated that Itum registered a separate company, the Los Angeles-based Kaleidoscope Productions LLC, in 2017. The executive allegedly borrowed money to fund a Kaleidoscope promotional event at the next year’s edition of Coachella, then paid back his debts by siphoning money from Helios & Matheson Analytics through falsified invoices.
Itum was first arrested for the charges in February last year, before pleading not guilty and being released on $75,000 bond. Prior to that, Variety had reported in 2019 that Itum had pleaded guilty to stealing money from a previous employer, a furniture company.
A sentencing for Itum is scheduled for April 29. He faces a statutory maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison.
