An Auckland plasterer who defrauded the Covid-19 Wage Subsidy scheme of more than $125,000 has been sentenced to two years and eight months in prison.<\/p>\n
Deva Brown Phuhathakarn, a plasterer from Avondale, was sentenced in the Wait\u0101kere District Court on October 15 after pleading guilty to two representative charges of using a document for pecuniary advantage.<\/p>\n
The charges related to 23 applications Phuhathakarn submitted between March 2020 and March 2021 under his own name and thorugh his company Complete Plastering Solutions Limited.<\/p>\n
Nine of the applications were successful, resulting in $125,103.20 paid into his bank accounts. The remaining 14 claims, worth $33,976.40, were declined.<\/p>\n
Some of the applications included lists of supposed full-time employees, none of whom were actually employed by the business.<\/p>\n
Inland Revenue records show Phuhathakarn filed PAYE returns for several of these individuals around the same time he submitted the wage subsidy applications, giving the claims an air of legitimacy.<\/p>\n
Judge Andr\u00e9e Wiltens described the offending as “deliberate and sustained” and noted it was designed to cheat the system.<\/p>\n
While credit was given for Phuhathakarn\u2019s guilty pleas, no other mitigating factors were found.<\/p>\n
The Ministry of Social Development (MSD) said 53 people had now been sentenced in wage subsidy fraud cases, with another 51 still before the courts. More than $830 million in wage subsidies had been repaid since the scheme began.<\/p>\n
The morning’s headlines in 90 seconds, including a swathe of weather warnings, thieves make off with France\u2019s crown jewels, and a new police investigation into Prince Andrew. (Source: 1News)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An Auckland plasterer who defrauded the Covid-19 Wage Subsidy scheme of more than $125,000 has been sentenced to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":89005,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[51,67,111,139,69,213],"class_list":{"0":"post-89004","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-auckland","9":"tag-crime-and-justice","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz","13":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89004","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=89004"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89004\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}