30-Year-Old Employee of Pub Stoke Over $40,000 Pleads Guilty & Avoids Full-Time Jail

Our client is a 30 year old man from West Hoxton.

He was employed as a manager at a pub. As part of his day to day duties, he was required to reconcile money. On a daily basis he was allowed access to money from two automatic teller machines (ATMs), the trade safe, poker machines and cash registers, which collectively contained cash up to $300,000.00.

It was reported that on multiple occasions, that during his shift, our client would remove large sums of money from the drop safe and would falsify financial ledgers.

Additionally, on several occasions, staff members provided sums of money to our client to store in the safe. It was reported that once he received possession of this cash, he wrote his name on the reconciliation spreadsheet, taking those cash amounts for himself.

The Group Operations Manager was informed that there was a $20,000.00 deficit missing from the safe. Upon further review of the safe book, he discovered there were other inconsistencies with the safe balance spreadsheet. The Group Operations Manager arranged a meeting with our client where he confronted him about stealing from the business. Subsequently, our client admitted to stealing from the ATMs, safe and banking bags.

An internal review of the financial records of the pub was conducted. These records were conveyed to the Police. The Police subsequently charged our client with 4 counts of steal property as clerk/servant to an amount over $40,000.00.

He sought advice from our Sydney based criminal lawyers.

Due to the seriousness of the charges, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) wanted to elect the matter to be dealt with in the District Court (instead of the Local Court). This would have meant that our client would be subject to a higher maximum sentence of imprisonment of up to 10 years as opposed to 2 years in the Local Court.

Our firm relentlessly commenced negotiations with the Police to have the matter remain in the Local Court. Our negotiations were successful and we entered a plea of guilty to the charges in the Local Court.

As part of our preparations for sentence, our senior associate criminal lawyer Fouad Awada obtained crucial and relevant documents including a psychologist report, a report from our client’s counsellor, Sentencing Assessment Report and several Character References.

Additionally, Mr. Awada prepared lengthy and detailed written submissions regarding the appropriate sentence for our client’s matter. Upon reading the written submissions, the Magistrate remarked that our submissions were thorough, and aided the court in arriving at the appropriate penalty.

Accordingly, the Magistrate was convinced that an imprisonment sentence was inappropriate and sentenced our client to an Intensive Correction Order for a period of 10 months instead of full-time jail.

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