SEATTLE (AP) - A former Seattle software executive used his company as a "personal piggy bank" while overstating its revenues to attract $50 million in private investment, a prosecutor said Friday.

Paul Thomas Johnston, founder and chief executive of startup Entellium Corp., was ordered detained pending trial by a federal magistrate judge who deemed him a flight risk. Assistant U.S. Attorney Carl Blackstone told the court that Johnston paid himself $1.1 million over the past five years - not including two $50,000 loans he took without the knowledge of Entellium's board of directors this year.

He also took his family on trips to California and Singapore on the company credit card, Blackstone said, and the company's board is questioning whether $9.6 million in transfers from Entellium's Seattle office to its office in Malaysia actually made it there.

"They just don't have a full accounting of where it went," Blackstone said.

Johnston and Entellium's chief financial officer, Parrish Jones, were arrested this week and charged with wire fraud in a case that stunned the venture capital world. Johnston acknowledged in his resignation e-mail that he and Jones overstated the company's revenue by $400,000 a month in an effort to impress its directors and other potential investors, and said he was "deeply shamed and sorry" about it.

Jones has been released after putting up his condo as bond. He was represented earlier this week by a court-appointed lawyer, who did not speak to reporters.

Many people in the industry have asked how well-respected venture capital firms could have been duped into giving Entellium tens of millions of dollars. Nearly $20 million came from Bellevue-based Ignition Partners, a project of former Microsoft Corp. and McCaw Cellular executives that has become Washington state's largest venture capital firm, with more than $1.5 billion under management.

Ignition Partners has not returned calls for comment.

One former Entellium vice president has suggested no audits were done, and the accounting firm of Moss Adams said Friday it started audits of several years of Entellium's finances, but never finished them.

"We're looking into that," Neal West, Moss Adams' chief practice officer, said when asked when the audits were started and why they were not completed.

The privately held Entellium makes Web-based programs that help companies track sales and customer information. Johnston, a citizen of the United Kingdom, founded it in Malaysia in 2000 and opened its Seattle office in 2004.

Most of the 60 employees in Seattle have been laid off in recent days, and Blackstone said he believed the company was pursuing a sale.

Evidence of fraud emerged late last month when a human resources worker discovered five sets of "board books" - compilations of financial data presented to board members. The books claimed revenue of nearly $15.5 million since 2006, when in reality the company took in less than $3.8 million, prosecutors said.

Johnston's court-appointed lawyer, Robert Gombiner, did not address allegations in court Friday that Johnston used company money for personal reasons or that he took loans without board knowledge. But Gombiner said he believed it would become clear that the $9.6 million was transferred appropriately.

He also argued for Johnston to be released on GPS monitoring, saying that if he was going to flee, he would have done it before he was arrested.

Magistrate Judge Mary Alice Theiler didn't buy it. She said she had concerns not only about the $9.6 million, but because Johnston has virtually no assets - even though he paid himself well. He bought a $1.1 million home in Mercer Island in 2006, but has little equity in it, and owes more on two cars - a Maserati and a Porsche - than their market value, according to prosecutors and the judge.

"The question certainly arises: What happened to all that (money)?" Theiler said.