Accountant cops repeat conviction for fraud
A former high-flying accountant brought low a decade ago by a fraud conviction went on to reinvent himself as a pig farmer, only to once again end up in front of a judge facing fraud charges.
This month Mark Joseph Benjamin was convicted in the Manukau District Court and sentenced to nine months home detention after admitting one representative charge of theft by a person in a special relationship.
Benjamin had funnelled more than half a million dollars from his employer to try to prop up his own failing businesses.
In 2010, he was also before the courts, when a judge found him guilty of seven fraud charges over his alteration — as chief financial officer — of his employer’s payroll documents to secretly give himself extra leave entitlements and boost his $165,000 salary by $10,000 a year.
He lost his role as a director of Crown entity Hortresearch and his registration as a chartered accountant after the conviction.
At the more recent court hearing it was revealed Benjamin had gone on to be employed as executive director of East Tamaki piggery Five Star Pork, where he had the company make $505,000 in unlawful payments to Kaimai Pork, a pig farm for which he served as a director, between January and September 2016.
Kaimai Pork and its parent NZ Pork — also directed by Benjamin — went into liquidation in early 2017. The most recent liquidator’s reports for the two companies said between them more than $8 million was owed to creditors with no assets available to satisfy them.
In 2017, Benjamin, as director of Kaimai Pork, was convicted and fined $8000 for failing to comply with a Waikato Regional Council abatement notice requiring better effluent management.
Five Star Pork director Kevin Monks, who fired Benjamin and took over as chief executive once the fraud was discovered, said it had been a difficult six years as the process wound through the courts.
“Your faith in human nature goes out the door,” he said of the fallout from the fraud.
Benjamin had repaid the stolen funds by late 2017, but Monks said he felt obliged to file a complaint and see the criminal justice process through to its conclusion.
Monks said Benjamin had been recommended by his chairman and he was unaware of his incoming chief executive’s prior conviction.
He said he learned of Benjamin’s past when the Companies Office told Five Star he was subject to a disqualification order preventing him from being a director.
Monks said he regretted helping Benjamin to get that order lifted.
Monks said he was happy with the results of the sentencing, particularly the end of suppression.
“He’s a liar and a thief and I’m happy with any sentence that gives him a criminal conviction,” he said.
Benjamin had obtained interim name suppression at his first appearance, and applied on sentencing to make it permanent and for his sentence to be downgraded to community service.
These applications were rejected by Judge Gerard Winter.
Monks was critical of suppression having been in place for so long: “He had six years of it, and given that it went on for so long, what other damage could he have done in that time?”
Benjamin will serve his home detention at a home in Mt Eden with a rateable valuation of $2.24m.