MANDEL: GTA fraudster loses appeal of jail sentence
· Toronto Sun
Brenda Andrew has a habit of bilking her bosses.
She’d slip from employer to employer and when caught, she’d get a slap on the wrist and move on to the next victim. But a Toronto judge finally sentenced her to real jail time and Ontario’s highest court has just agreed she had it coming.
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On Feb. 2, 2024, Andrew, 66, pled guilty to a large-scale, multi-year fraud she perpetrated against Vertechs Design Inc., where she was in charge of the small landscape architecture company’s payroll, bookkeeping and payments to vendors and suppliers. Over three years, she stole more than $210,000 from the business by carrying out what the appeal court called “relatively sophisticated fraudulent schemes and forgeries.”
According to court documents, between April 2016 and July 2018, she used an old corporate Amex, which she’d been told to cancel, to make numerous personal purchases amounting to $39,646.24, including for clothing, restaurant meals, spa treatments, concert tickets and an overseas holiday to Belize with her daughter.
She then paid for the credit card bills with cheques drawn on the company’s bank account.
Between April 2016 and January 2019, the court said, Andrew also issued 45 fraudulent payments to herself through the payroll system, totaling $171,072.88 after deductions. She tried to conceal these payments by forging T4 slips that inflated other employees’ incomes and decreased her own.
For Andrew’s guilty plea to one count of fraud over $5,000, her expression of remorse and full restitution — she repaid the amount she stole using $150,000 gifted to her by her elderly mom and $60,000 from selling her own cars and jewellery — her lawyer asked for a conditional sentence of two years to be served at home.
But Superior Court Justice Michael Code said he had to consider that this was hardly her first offence.
Lengthy criminal record
Andrew’s criminal record has entries for 1980, 1984, 1993, 2012 and 2015 and Code said the latter two convictions were for crimes of fraud and theft from former employers that were remarkably similar to her latest scheme. In 2012, at age 53, she was convicted of three counts of fraud over $5,000 involving three different victims and received a one-year conditional sentence and a $35,070 restitution order — which she hasn’t paid.
Her 2015 conviction was for stealing $1,380 in cash that she should have deposited into her employer’s bank account — and that netted her a $1,000 fine and one year of probation.
“This pattern of ongoing crimes of dishonesty against her employers extends from 2009 until 2019,” Code wrote in his September 2024 ruling. “The conditional sentence that Andrew received in 2012, for three separate frauds, clearly did not deter her. As a result, there is a strong need for both specific deterrence and general deterrence in this case.”
The judge noted the usual range for this type of fraud would be three to five years in prison, but due to her guilty plea and restitution, he was sentencing her to two years less a day in jail. Code also banned her for life from having authority over the property, cash or valuables of another person.
Andrew appealed, arguing the trial judge should have taken into consideration her health issues — she had a stroke and suffers from high blood pressure — and the need to visit her 86-year-old mom in Winnipeg. But it fell on deaf ears.
“As the sentencing judge properly noted, these convictions, combined with the present offence, ‘show a consistent and apparently entrenched pattern of stealing from and defrauding a series of employers,'” Justice Lois B. Roberts recently wrote on behalf of the three-judge appeal panel.
Andrew’s fraud also had a devastating effect on her employers, she noted, who had two young children, had gone into debt to purchase the company and who managed to attain profitability only after the woman they once trusted was finally gone.
And, the court concluded, her previous lenient sentences failed to deter Andrew from defrauding new victims: just 51 days after completing her conditional sentence for the 2012 conviction, she began the fraud that led to her 2015 conviction. And two months after finishing her probation order for that crime, she started defrauding Vertechs.
She’s had her chances. Maybe a jail sentence will finally end her cheating ways.