A prominent local attorney and non-profit board member has been arrested and charged with corrupt business influence and theft amid allegations he took more than $100,000 from his clients’ trust fund accounts.

Arrested Thursday, Daniel E. Serban, 53, of the 10000 block of Cygnet Cove in Roanoke, is accused of failing to distribute money paid into Serban Law Office’s Trust Account to the appropriate clients or to those entitled by court order to receive it. According to court documents, the behavior continued from January 2006 until Tuesday.

Both charges are felonies, and if convicted, Serban could serve two or more years in prison.

Attorneys are required to keep escrow-type accounts where money either coming from or going to their clients will be kept. Those accounts are to be treated with extreme fiduciary care and attorneys have a strong ethical responsibility to protect that money, according to the Allen County Prosecutor’s Office.

Much of the money misappropriated, according to prosecutors, came from a civil case filed in 2003. In that case, Serban represented R. Bruce Dye in a dispute with former business partners over money.

According to court documents, Dye invested heavily into a sports merchandising company, especially as the company fell into tough economic times. The other men involved in the venture, A. Wayne Gibson and Don Shearer, were ordered by an Allen Superior Court judge to reimburse Dye some of the money he spent paying off creditors. Gibson and Shearer appealed, but in October 2008, the Indiana Court of Appeals upheld the ruling.

Shearer and Gibson were ordered to pay Dye back, each sending him checks for more than $54,000, according to court documents.

Those checks were deposited into Serban Law Office’s Trust Account by early January 2009. While Serban filed paperwork with the courts indicating Gibson and Shearer paid what they owed, Dye was never told about the money, according to court documents.

In July 2009, Dye had another attorney, Dale Bloom, inquire about the collection of the money. Serban told the other attorney he only collected $10,000 on the judgments but said Dye owed him $8,000 in legal fees, according to court documents.

After that conversation, Serban mailed Dye a check in the amount of $1,740, along with an itemized client ledger explaining Dye’s legal debts, according to court documents.

But the ledger included a charge for preparing the court paperwork releasing the judgments against Shearer and Gibson, causing Dye to continue to investigate, according to court documents.

Bloom contacted Shearer’s and Gibson’s attorneys, discovering they sent Serban a total of more than $100,000. Bloom confronted Serban, who denied any wrongdoing, but provided a $99,202 check for Dye, drawn on a different trust account, according to court documents.

Former employees of Serban told investigators they began tracking shortages in the trust account caused because he was taking money out of the account. A number of employees quit working for Serban’s law firm in part because of the “financial irregularities,” according to court documents.

One of the employees produced records showing 680 checks she had written to Serban’s clients – money that should have been paid out of the trust account – that had never cleared. Only Serban could sign for the checks and make withdrawals on the accounts, according to court documents.

Members of another Fort Wayne law firm had used Serban to collect past-due bills from their clients. After they realized they had not received any money from Serban in more than a year, they confronted him. Serban gave them a check for $237 and said he would “look into it,” according to court documents.

Serban is a board member and former president of the child-advocacy group SCAN.

He was being held Thursday night in lieu of $40,000 bail.

rgreen@jg.net