Woman gets 30 months for embezzlement

A former bookkeeper who embezzled nearly $1 million from her unwitting employers was sentenced Thursday to 30 months in prison. Nada Khalaf, 59, defrauded the sister companies of MOS Enterprises and Kapital Produce in Leamington, and Windsor’s Service Mold and Aerospace, of a total of $975,000.

Assistant Crown attorney Scott Kerwin, who argued Khalaf should be sentenced to at least three years, called Thursday’s sentencing a “well-reasoned decision.” “There’s this common misperception that white collar crime is victimless,” said Kerwin. “But in this case, as evidenced through the victim impact statement of one of the corporate owners, it had devastating consequences for the liability of the company as well as the continued employment of some of their employees.”

Khalaf, who pleaded guilty earlier this year to two counts of fraud and one count of passing forged documents, is also banned for five years from working in any capacity where she has control over anyone’s finances.

She wrote cheques to herself while working at the Leamington companies between 2012 and 2015. After she was charged with defrauding those companies, Service Mold and Aerospace, Khalaf ’s former employer, started looking into its books.

That company discovered she had also taken massive amounts of money during her time there between 2008 and 2012. Defence lawyer Robert DiPietro, who asked that his client be sentenced to house arrest, had argued Khalaf didn’t steal for greed. Court previously heard that Khalaf, a regular at Caesars Windsor, had racked up nearly $1 million in losses.

“She was somewhat disappointed that the judge didn’t consider the conditional sentence,” said DiPietro.

“But it’s one of those situations where, had you made a lot of restitution to the parties, I think it would have tipped the scales closer to a conditional sentence. When you have a loss of $975,000 and none of it’s been repaid, it doesn’t have the ring that people are ever going to collect on it.” DiPietro said the judge took into account several mitigating factors. Those included Khalaf ’s gambling addiction and her attempts at rehabilitation, the fact that Khalaf takes care of her husband who has Stage 4 prostate cancer, and her son’s suicide six months ago.