Off to jail skint after big frauds
It was the plane trip the principal didn’t take that led to fraudster Tessa Grant’s unravelling.
The discovery of a receipt for the $1492 return flight turned out to be the tip of an iceberg of swindling.
The flight to Christchurch in April 2015 – supposedly for Waikato Diocesan School for Girls principal Vicky Mclennan and her husband – was actually taken by Grant and her husband.
Grant, 41, ripped off her employers at Waikato Dio and Skycity Hamilton for $800,000 and $2 million respectively.
In the Hamilton District Court yesterday, she went from wiping available funds out of the two organisations’ coffers to wiping the tears from her eyes as she was jailed for seven years and eight months.
Judge Philip Connell also issued a 50 per cent non-parole period.
It was a dramatic fall from grace for Grant, who used the money she stole to fund a luxurious equestrian-oriented lifestyle.
She pleaded guilty in June to swindling $1,980,922 from Skycity over five years; she pleaded guilty in January last year to swiping $795,000 from the school.
She was due to be sentenced in 2016 on seven charges of fraud laid over the Waikato Dio offending but that was postponed when her Skycity offending came to light.
‘‘You have sought to minimise and justify your offending,’’ Judge Connell told Grant.
A pre-sentence report concluded Grant had a ‘‘high sense of entitlement’’.
‘‘You don’t have remorse. You simply regret the fact that you have been caught.’’
Earlier, defence lawyer Guyon Foley told the court his client was ‘‘wracked by guilt and remorse’’.
‘‘She has nothing now. She has the clothes she is standing up in.’’
Grant had begun taking the money to support a family member, but ’’the perceived need became greed’’.
‘‘It’s unfortunate for her and for Skycity that her offending ran unchecked for so long.’’
The Skycity embezzlement took place via 71 transactions between December 2008 and April 2013.
After leaving Skycity, Grant was employed as commercial manager at Waikato Diocesan for 14 months until her resignation in September 2015.
Through covert transactions and forged documents, she took $795,000 from the school between December 2014 and August 2015.