An Otago businessman swindled nearly $30,000 from the government by inventing wages to claim subsidies during Covid-19.<\/p>\n
Tony Peter Haines, 33, appeared in the Dunedin District Court yesterday after earlier admitting three charges of dishonestly using a document.<\/p>\n
The charges represented several false applications between April 2020 and September 2021.<\/p>\n
The court heard that the defendant previously ran trucking business Clutha Carrying Company Ltd and had multiple employees.<\/p>\n
He claimed wage subsidies offered by the government during the Covid-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n
As well as making legitimate applications, Haines claimed multiple employees had been working when they had not, and claimed cash back for their imaginary wages.<\/p>\n
He also claimed full-time wages payments for a part-time employee and continued to receive subsidies for staff after they had left the company.<\/p>\n
A total of $29,196 was swindled through the defendant\u2019s false applications.<\/p>\n
At times, Haines suggested his mother was the director of the company, rather than him.<\/p>\n
Yesterday, counsel John Westgate said his client posed a low risk of reoffending and had paid back the money he took.<\/p>\n
“You\u2019re not going to see him back here again,” the lawyer said.<\/p>\n
Haines was now self-employed as a truck driver and crane operator, the court heard.<\/p>\n
Judge Hermann Retzlaff agreed it was unlikely the defendant would reoffend, noting he had no prior convictions, but said the theft was serious.<\/p>\n
“This was taxpayer money, and it was for supporting the community, and it\u2019s been taken advantage of,” the judge said.<\/p>\n
While Mr Westgate argued for a sentence of community detention and community work, Judge Retzlaff ruled that was “too lenient”.<\/p>\n
He sentenced Haines to seven months\u2019 home detention.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An Otago businessman swindled nearly $30,000 from the government by inventing wages to claim subsidies during Covid-19. Tony…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":290786,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-290785","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290785","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=290785"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290785\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/290786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}