{"id":116998,"date":"2025-11-04T07:01:10","date_gmt":"2025-11-04T07:01:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/116998\/"},"modified":"2025-11-04T07:01:10","modified_gmt":"2025-11-04T07:01:10","slug":"imprisoned-mum-of-five-ariana-thompson-bell-fights-for-home-detention","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/116998\/","title":{"rendered":"Imprisoned mum of five Ariana Thompson-Bell fights for home detention"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThis was a very warped sense of entitlement<\/a> to money that she knew … she was not entitled to.\u201d<\/p>\n

After taking a starting point of five years\u2019 jail and issuing discounts totalling 55%, she then jailed Thompson-Bell for 27 months.<\/p>\n

This week her lawyer Christine Hardy was in the High Court at Hamilton appealing that sentence on three grounds.<\/p>\n

She said the starting point was too high, there was insufficient credit for previous good character (5% should have been 10%), and credit for remorse and restorative justice was 5%, but should have been 10%.<\/p>\n

But Crown prosecutor Raewyn Greenhalgh said the starting point was within the normal range, and the discounts were adequate given her high breach of trust and impact on the organisation that had to seek name suppression to protect its credibility.<\/p>\n

\u2018It was driven by greed\u2019<\/p>\n

Between 2021 and 2023, Thompson-Bell began siphoning money out of the trust\u2019s account.<\/p>\n

Instead of paying legitimate invoices to service providers, she put the money into one of four accounts she had control of, including one belonging to her young daughter.<\/p>\n

In 2023, the chief executive started receiving letters from the IRD and other companies stating that payments had been missed.<\/p>\n

A forensic accountant investigated and discovered one of the accounts belonged to a staff member, identified as Thompson-Bell.<\/p>\n

In total, $499,972.55 was stolen.<\/p>\n

Since first appearing in court last year, a total of $66,355.93 has been repaid, which included about $40,000 from her mother.<\/p>\n

At sentencing, and trying to describe the impetus behind her offending, Judge Clark said one word came to mind, \u201cgreed\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u2018She should have been sentenced to home detention\u2019<\/p>\n

Hardy submitted that this was a case where home detention should have been reached.<\/p>\n

She explained that as soon as the offending was discovered, she engaged in a hui, effectively a restorative justice conference, where the trust asked her to start paying the money back.<\/p>\n

Together with a $40,000 payment from her mother, $66,355.93 was repaid.<\/p>\n

She said a starting point of between four years and six months or eight months would have been more appropriate.<\/p>\n

Also, her offending wasn\u2019t sophisticated; \u201cit was simply changing bank account numbers\u201d. <\/p>\n

Thompson-Bell was a mother of five and is currently pregnant in prison with her sixth child.<\/p>\n

Justice Andrew Becroft asked about her husband, and Hardy said he had to resign from his Department of Conservation job to become a fulltime caregiver to their five children.<\/p>\n

He said it was an interesting case, as the judge had allowed 55% in discounts, which wouldn\u2019t happen now given the legislative change capping discounts at 40%.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a two-year period. It\u2019s not just a one-off … I think it\u2019s a lot of money, half a million dollars.\u201d<\/p>\n

But there was one key aspect where Justice Becroft appeared to offer a glimmer of hope for further discount – insufficient credit for previous good character.<\/p>\n

She said Judge Clark had refused to acknowledge it and instead treated it as a neutral factor with the absence of an aggravating feature.<\/p>\n

\u201cHowever, the Court of Appeal has previously found that approach is an error … that a defendant without any previous convictions … or first [offender] should receive recognition of that fact,\u201d Hardy said.<\/p>\n

Justice Becroft soon after questioned it himself.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m just not satisfied, on the face of it, that that is a proper analysis,\u201d he told Greenhalgh when discussing the same issue.<\/p>\n

But she submitted that the judge had already incorporated that aspect when issuing her 5%.<\/p>\n

Justice Becroft said it was easy for him to \u201cpick apart\u201d another judge\u2019s sentence carried out likely on a busy court list day.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut if there\u2019s an error, that\u2019s probably one that\u2019s explicit on its face,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

After a few mathematical equations, it was deemed that if the starting point stayed the same but an additional 5% credit was given, it would get Thompson-Bell down to 24 months jail, and make her eligible for home detention. <\/p>\n

Justice Becroft reserved his decision.<\/p>\n

Belinda Feek is an Open Justice reporter based in Waikato. She has worked at NZME for 10 years and has been a journalist for 21.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThis was a very warped sense of entitlement to money that she knew … she was not entitled…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":116999,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[82996,20556,51175,1342,2082,1345,54106,2721,111,139,69,1118,213,82997],"class_list":["post-116998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ariana","tag-detention","tag-fights","tag-five","tag-for","tag-home","tag-imprisoned","tag-mum","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-of","tag-sports","tag-thompsonbell"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116998"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116998\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/116999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}