71-year-old fraudster bad as serious offenders

A 71-year-old woman who stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from her employer was told yesterday she was as bad as serious fraudsters who refused to admit they had done anything wrong.

Judge Graham Hubble told Joan Dorothy Roberts, of Waiheke Island, that she "fell into the mould of quite serious fraudsters" he saw regularly in court.

"In some of those cases, literally dozens of people lost their entire life savings," Judge Hubble told Roberts.

Frequently those people who had been ripped off were older people who lost money they had saved for retirement.

Roberts was sentenced to 10 months' home detention when she appeared in the Auckland District Court yesterday, after being found guilty of five fraud charges at a trial last year. She pleaded guilty to two charges of using forged documents.

She took hundreds of thousands of dollars from her employer, Aotearoa Mature Employment Service (Ames), a voluntary organisation set up to assist older people back into work.

The exact figure wasn't known but it was somewhere between $250,000 and $450,000. She used an Ames cheque to obtain a $58,000 bank cheque which went towards a Waiheke Island house and deceptively obtained loans from three lending institutions.

Judge Hubble said a common feature of fraudsters was that they continued what they were doing and didn't think they would be caught. It was of "no surprise" to him that she entered not guilty pleas to five charges.

"I marvelled at the way you thought you could get away with it."

Her guilty pleas on two charges were because it was so obvious she had done them, he said.

The fraud left Ames in an awkward financial position. "The extent of your fraudulent dealing was such it is amazing Ames survived."

The court heard Roberts tried to sustain a myth that $500,000 was in a bank account. "How you thought you could get away with it is a mystery to me."

He said her use of Ames money to buy a house was pure greed, but acknowledged she had helped students who were short of money in acts of "misplaced altruism".

Prosecutor Nicholas Davidson, QC, did not seek a jail term even though the fraud was serious enough to warrant one. He told the court there had been a full and final settlement and Roberts, who is in poor health, had no previous convictions.

Ames chief executive George Marr told the Weekend Herald Roberts' offending had left him and others devastated.

"We were in complete disbelief. There was no way we would [believe it]. She was like one of the family."

Roberts' offending meant Ames was left in a shaky position financially but it has since recovered. "It denied us our growth. It put us in a position we had to be very careful ... it was touch and go."

Mr Marr said he wasn't happy with the home detention sentence but accepted it.