Court Report: Expensive taste
NBR reporter Hamish McNicol discusses the latest court stories on NBR Radio and on demand on MyNBR Radio.
A colourful fraudster who stole more than $64.5 million from South Canterbury Finance has been denied parole this week.
NBR court reporter Hamish McNicol says the Parole Board was not convinced Gavin Clifford Bennett, who was in 2012 sentenced to eight years in jail after pleading guilty to submitting nearly 900 false invoices to South Canterbury Finance over six years, would not pose any risk to the community.
Bennett’s “unprecedented” fraud involved the use of his company DataSouth to run a ponzi-style network of loans to sustain a lavish lifestyle, channelling $7.8 million to personal New Zealand and Australian bank accounts or credit cards.
Mr McNicol says the spending included nearly $A1 million in regular payments to “various female companions,” $A463,000 in rental payments for luxury apartments, $A429,000 on food and beverages and $A163,000 on designer clothes from Louis Vuitton, Cartier, Chanel, Georgio Armani, Gucci, Harrods in London and Bloomingdales in New York.
The Parole Board says Bennett is “ashamed of his offending but requires a safety plan for his reintegration into the community before he next appears in December.
Otherwise, Mr McNicol details a story about a man who was tied up with an ACC corruption scandal who has been found guilty of more than $1 million in tax fraud, as featured in today’s NBR print edition.
Paul Cornell Coffey was last month found guilty of 79 of 97 tax fraud charges relating to the unpaid tax obligations of the two companies, having instead spent the money on multiple luxury cars, apartments and “entertainment.”
The judge found the issue is not about the legitimacy of the spending, which included an Aston Martin, BMW, and Hummer, but rather the “level of expenditure” at a time the man’s businesses were not paying tax.
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Fri, 02 Oct 2015
Fri, 02 Oct 2015
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Court Report: Expensive taste
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