LAS CRUCES - A California woman has been sentenced to more than three years in prison and pay $856,000 in restitution for defrauding a number of Spartan Health Sciences School of Medicine students in the late 1990s.

Chief U.S. District Judge Bruce D. Black sentenced Flavia Bolourchi, 59, of Sacramento, Calif., to 37 months in prison Tuesday, U. S. Attorney Kenneth J. Gonzales announced.

Bolourchi pled guilty on March 10, 2010, to mail fraud, interstate transportation of stolen property, money laundering and tax evasion, charges that stemmed from an investigation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement as well as the Internal Revenue Service.

Between Jan. 3, 1997, and Aug. 20, 1999, Bolourchi was employed as the financial officer of Spartan Health Sciences School of Medicine, which moved its corporate headquarters to El Paso, Texas and Santa Teresa, N.M. in March, 1998, according to her indictment. As part of her duties, Bolourchi received student loan checks and disbursed them to students to cover tuition and other expenses. But instead of depositing funds from these checks into Spartan's bank account, Bolourchi deposited the funds into her own bank account in Santa Teresa.

To conceal her fraud, Bolourchi made false entries in Spartan's financial records, then failed to pay $320,483 in federal income taxes on her fraudulent income.

Criminal charges were filed in 2002, but it took until late 2009 before authorities found and arrested her in Bahrain, a Middle

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Eastern island nation just east of Saudi Arabia. The case was subsequently prosecuted by Supervisory Assistant U. S. Attorney Richard Williams.

Bolourchi remains free on a $25,000 bond until she is directed to report to the Bureau of Prisons for her sentence.