A FORMER office manager was jailed for a year and ordered to pay compensation of nearly $137,000 on Monday in the Bathurst Local Court.
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Jennifer Rose Collisson, 49, who now lives in Yamba, immediately lodged an appeal against the severity of the sentence of a year’s jail with a non parole period of eight months.
She immediately lodged a bail application, seeking to be released pending the appeal to be heard on a date to be fixed in the District Court.
But presiding magistrate Jan Stevenson would not consider the application telling Collisson’s solicitor Tim Cain he could apply to another court. Collisson, of Taine Court, Yamba was led from the court to the Bathurst Court House cells pending the hearing of her application for bail today in the Lithgow Local Court.
Mr Cain had entered guilty pleas on 33 of 35 charges police laid against Collisson relating to her fraudulent transfer of more than $137,000 from her employer’s two Bathurst business accounts over 12 months of heavy poker machine gambling.
The solicitor said Collisson admitted obtaining money by deception while the administrator and office manager for JVE Admin Pty Ltd and Agile Arbor Pty Ltd in Bathurst.
According to a police statement tendered to the court Collisson had withdrawn money mostly at the Bathurst RSL Club. She has been ordered to reimburse $136,990.75. Records of her poker machine transactions revealed she had spent $111,945.97 over 12 months.
She was met by police from Bathurst on May 18 at the Yamba Police Station to face the fraud allegations, but declined to be interviewed.
Business owners Gregor and Juliette Van Emmerik initially employed Collison in their office administration business as an administration officer, before she became office manager.
Collisson had been responsible for paying and issuing invoices, wages, tendering and general accounts keeping for JVE and Agile, the statement said.
Collisson was given complete access to ANZ Bank accounts and regularly paid invoices from each respective bank account.
The first transfer occurred on March 13, 2009 for $139.95 from the Agile account to Collisson’s account where she was sole signatory, police said. She had then made an entry in the MYOB Office Account computer system reconciling this expense to herself.
Collisson had transferred another $400 from Agile on May 4, 2009 to her account and made an entry in MYOB office computer system reconciling this expense to a man that did business with the company, to prevent detection.
She made similar transfers in the names of other businessmen prior to her March 1 termination of employment when $137,174.70 had been misappropriated.
Jailing Collisson, magistrate Jan Stevenson said she had orchestrated “a gross breach of trust during a consistent course of [criminal] conduct”.
