Woman in $250k plot was naive, court told
A woman’s unsophisticated plot to blackmail her former boss for $250,000 after an employment dispute was ‘‘naive’’, her lawyer said.
After leaving her job at Taranaki ByProducts, an animal rendering plant, Shazmatt Samantha Henry sent her exmanager threatening emails.
She warned that if he didn’t pay up she would start spilling information about the company to its customers.
Henry, who previously pleaded guilty to blackmail, appeared in the Ha¯ wera District Court yesterday for sentencing.
Lawyer Kylie Pascoe said Henry had been having problems with her employer but felt it was easier to leave her job rather than to pursue it through the proper channels.
It was after she left that she hatched her blackmail plan.
‘‘There really was a naivety, if you like, in terms of her comprehension of what she was doing,’’ Pascoe said.
Henry had worked at the company for almost three years before she left on July 16 last year.
The summary of facts said 11 days earlier the plant manager handed Henry a letter saying she had to attend a meeting regarding an issue of ‘‘serious misconduct’’. The 29-year-old never turned up to the meeting and resigned.
On July 26, the defendant sent the plant manager an email in which she threatened to disclose company information to its customers.
She followed up the threat by demanding a payment of $250,000 in order to stay quiet. After receiving no reply, she sent two more threatening emails to her ex-boss.
At this point, the victim responded and said any further contact would result in the police being called. In reply, Henry wrote that she had ‘‘enough good footage to close the plant down’’, the summary of facts said.
After the plant manager received this email, he informed police.
Pascoe said Henry had a job offer and had taken steps to investigate counselling options but the cost, at $60 a session, was a barrier at the moment.
However, she said Henry was highly motivated and deemed by the probation service to be at low risk of reoffending.
Prosecutor Cherie Clarke said an attempt was made to get a victim impact statement from the company for the sentencing hearing but one was not made available.
She said while jail was the starting point for this type of offending, a sentence of home detention was appropriate.
Judge Garry Barkle said Henry had described her offending as ‘‘dumb’’ and had shown remorse.
He said the aggravating factors in the case included the professional relationship Henry previously had with the victim and the abuse of trust, along with the significant sum of money involved and the ‘‘persistent’’ nature of the extortion.
The judge said the offending was unsophisticated and there was no information to show it had damaged the company’s reputation in anyway.
Henry was given credit for her previous good character, her remorse and her guilty plea to the charge.
The Normanby woman was sentenced to six month terms of community detention and supervision and ordered to complete 120 hours of community work.