REUTERS, Bloomberg –
Ippei Mizuhara, Shohei Ohtani’s former interpreter, has agreed to plead guilty to federal charges that he secretly transferred about $17 million from the player’s account to pay off his own gambling debts, court records showed Wednesday .
The plea deal between federal prosecutors and Mizuhara, the former interpreter and de facto manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers two-way star, was announced by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in LA, where the case was first filed last month.
Mizuhara incurred the debt through an illegal bookmaking operation – which Ohtani had no knowledge of – the US Justice Department said on Wednesday.
