GUILTY PLEA
Woman admits to taking $200,000 from a realty company.
A hard-working couple’s retirement dreams turned into a nightmare after a trusted employee stole their money and didn’t pay the bills.
Danielle Winter Adrian, 29, will learn her fate next week, after sentencing arguments were heard in Saskatoon Court of Queen’s Bench on Tuesday.
Adrian pleaded guilty to defrauding Sutton Group-Norland Realty Inc. of $200,000.
Adrian started working at Sutton Group in December 2006, when she was hired as the new office manager. When she was left alone with the books in early 2007, she started overpaying herself, paying her personal bills, writing cheques to her family and friends and to herself — all from Sutton Group’s accounts.
The total amount of her fraud was $199,838.48, Crown prosecutor Robin Ritter said in court. However, Adrian’s betrayal and its effects on the business went much deeper than that, owner Reg Kotlar said in his victim impact statement to the court.
Kotlar said he had always had office managers he could trust implicitly, and when Adrian married his nephew in 2008 and became part of the family, he thought he could trust her even more.
He first realized she was stealing from him in the fall of 2009, when he got a call from the bank advising him that one of his accounts was overdrawn. Kotlar went into the office one weekend to go through the cancelled cheques, and discovered Adrian’s thefts.
“I thought it was just $40,000, but the nightmare was just beginning,” Kotlar said.
The thefts eventually totalled $200,000, and he had $100,000 in unpaid bills — thanks to her — while Revenue Canada was chasing him for $25,000 in taxes.
Kotlar and his wife Sharon had to cash in all their retirement savings and remortgage their home, sell their cottage and borrow money from family and friends to stay afloat financially.
“Danielle’s actions have made our lives go in a totally different direction. We have gone from living the dream to enduring the nightmare,” Kotlar said. “We are further from retirement than we’ve ever been.”
He turned to alcohol, spiralling downward into depression, to the point where his wife, Sharon, contemplated leaving him — and their children encouraged her to, offering to buy her a condo so she could move out. She chose to stay.
“Thank God Sharon doesn’t run from problems or I’d have been doomed, because I was in no shape to run anything or even survive,” Kotlar said.
Sharon also spoke in court, outlining how she and Reg cried for months after realizing what Adrian had done. They still don’t know how to deal with the “overwhelming reality” of starting over when they’re in their sixties, she said.
The top agents at the company left, afraid it would go bankrupt, which compounded the Kotlars’ losses.
Adrian has not shown any remorse, aside from her guilty plea, Ritter noted in court. When first confronted about the thefts, she made excuses for each cheque. She told her now ex-husband the extra money was from her grandfather.
When she was interviewed by police in 2011, she claimed she needed the money to pay her bills, but records showed she used it to buy other things, such as a trip to the Caribbean and a new vehicle.
When asked whether she wanted to write an apology letter to Kotlar, Adrian told the police officer, “No … I don’t feel I should apologize to him for anything, after everything he has put me through since this …. An apology’s far from anything I’ll ever give him.”
Adrian chose not to speak when she was given the opportunity in court.
Ritter argued for a sentence of three to three and a half years in prison, while Adrian’s defence lawyer, Angus McLean, argued for a sentence served in the community, followed by probation.
Justice Richard Danyliuk reserved his decision to Dec. 19.