A district Court judge has ruled a $650,000 payment made by the father of disgraced Warilla realtor Megan Harrod soon after he discovered she had been taking money from the family business cannot be used as evidence against her in her sentencing.
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Harrod pleaded guilty to misappropriating hundreds of thousands of dollars from trust accounts linked to Harrod's Real Estate between 2010 and 2012, in her role as a director of the business.
NSW Fair Trading originally accused Harrod of siphoning upwards of $1.5 million from the accounts to fund her insatiable gambling habit. A disputed facts hearing in Parramatta District Court this week, put forward the lower sum of $1.3 million.
Harrod rejected both figures, claiming the amount she took was approximately $520,000.
The court heard the 50-year-old's father, Jim Harrod, unearthed his daughter's dodgy dealings after discovering anomalies in the financial records in early 2012 and immediately reported the matter to Fair Trading.
Soon after, Jim Harrod deposited $650,000 of his own money into the rent account in a bid to make amends for his daughter's conduct. Investigators later used this figure to help calculate the total funds they believed Harrod had siphoned.
However, the court heard it was unclear how Jim Harrod had arrived at this amount, and there was no evidence to support whether or not the figure was an accurate reflection of what had been taken by Harrod at the time.
Judge Andrew Colefax rejected Fair Trading's inclusion of the $650,000 in its final figures to the court, saying such a payment by a third party, even if it was a family member, could not be considered an admission of guilt for that amount by the defendant.
As a result, lawyers for both parties agreed on a revised sum of $795,000 - the majority of which is attributed to money taken from the real estate's rent trust account, to which Harrod was the sole signatory.
This access allowed Harrod to pull money out of the accounts on multiple occasions for her own use, while using a complex system of cash cheques, fake financial transactions and false bank reports to keep up the appearance of balanced accounts.
She poured $10 million through poker machines at Shellharbour Workers Club and Wests Illawarra in a seven-year period, including the time she was fleecing the company.
In court on Wednesday, Judge Colefax ordered a sentencing options report for Harrod, saying she faced the very real prospect of a stint behind bars.
Defence lawyer Sharyn Hall handed to the court two reports by different psychologists detailing aspects of Harrod's personal life, including her gambling addiction.