Closing in on Aspinall
New legal push against jailed and bankrupted manager
A BANKRUPT and once trusted office manager who is serving jail time for stealing $3.2m from her employer to fund her gambling addiction is facing a second bankruptcy.
Wendy Ann Aspinall’s former employer, Cairns’ Down to Earth Demolitions, filed a creditor’s petition in the Federal Court in Cairns last month asking the court for a sequestration order against Aspinall’s bankrupt estate.
The creditor’s petition says Aspinall owes Down to Earth Demolitions $1.56m because she failed to comply with a Supreme Court order to pay, made in March 2020.
The then 58-year-old was bankrupted on March 18, 2019, according to the bankruptcy register and is an undischarged bankrupt.
If the court grants the sequestration order, it will mean Aspinall is bankrupted for a second time.
Down to Earth Demolitions’ lawyer Doug McKinstry said the second bankruptcy was necessary because Aspinall declared herself bankrupt in 2019 before her guilty plea to fraud charges and before a civil judgment was obtained.
The Public Trustee, Aspinall’s bankruptcy trustee, would not accept Down to Earth Demolitions as a creditor in the first bankruptcy.
In July 2019, Aspinall was sentenced to serve a minimum of three years in prison of an 11-year sentence for embezzling $3.2m through cash withdrawals, phony cheques and electronic transfers between 2007 and 2017.
Almost $2.9m was lost to poker machines at the Reef Casino, her sentencing hearing was told. She pleaded guilty to four counts of fraud.
But during a Supreme Court hearing last year of a civil claim for the stolen money, Aspinall argued she had only stolen “about half” of the $3.2m she was sentenced for, and only agreed to plead guilty to stealing $3.2m because she didn’t want to face a trial.
Her crimes were discovered when Down to Earth Demolitions boss Rohan
Murphy found two blank cheque butts in June 2017.
Mr McKinstry told the civil hearing last year he was aware the prospects of clawing back the stolen cash were “very slim, given that we have a sixtysomething-yearold incarcerated, bankrupt, with one known asset which has a mortgage over it”.
The case is due for a Brisbane court hearing on May 5.