This is not a new scheme, anyone with time and patience can do this. The problem is how to make the scheme work on a large scale. This is what makes this case different.
Seriously. How did he actually think he was going to get away with this? Something doesn't seem right. What was his plan?
I wonder that about pretty much any case of embezzlement these days. With conventional larceny, a thief can appear clean after fencing the stolen goods, but moving money around other than as cash leaves a paper trail indefinitely. There's no point where you can say, "Now I've escaped with the loot, and everything's done."
Agreed, the timing was so precise in this case I just expected that he'd be out of the country by the time they came to his house a few days later. Maybe his plan was foiled when the banks froze his accounts almost immediately.