A group behind a failed attempt to defraud millions of dollars from a major bank has avoided going to jail while they are expected to potentially serve their sentences at home.
The ringleader behind the plot, ex-senior NAB employee Monika Singh, 42, was sentenced to three years in prison in the NSW District Court on Monday.
Co-defendants Davendar Deo, 68, and Srinivas Naidu Chamakuri, 51, were also given prison sentences for their roles in the scheme, two and a half years and three years respectively.
However, the trio were referred by Judge Donna Woodburne to be assessed by Corrective Services to potentially serve their sentences through periods of home detention and community service.
Judge Woodburne made it clear she was not imposing intensive corrections orders on the group and would conclude the cases at a later date.
The group was found guilty by a jury of attempting to steal more than $20 million from the bank using internal employee processes.
The trio was convicted of 19 fraud-related crimes between 2018 and 2020, including multiple charges of dishonestly obtaining a financial advantage.
A jury accepted that Singh had given Chamakuri and Deo blank internal bank vouchers, which they then used to defraud NAB of a total of $21 million.
Chamakuri tried to use the vouchers to withdraw almost $16.9 million in cash, while Deo was convicted of trying to defraud NAB of a further $4.8 million using the same fraudulent voucher scheme.
Monika Singh avoided a previous fraud conviction when she was a NAB trainee
Davendar Deo was convicted of attempting to defraud NAB of $4.8 million using the voucher program. (Steven Markham/AAP PHOTOS)
NAB lost no money when staff intervened to prevent the money from being transferred.
Judge Woodburne did not accept that stress, including Singh's childhood trauma, was the reason behind her offending and said her behavior needed to be strongly challenged.
The former senior employee at NAB's Sydney branch tried to claim she had “naively tried to help people without fully understanding the implications”, the court was told.
After migrating to Australia from Fiji in 2001, when she was 20 years old, Singh was charged with a previous fraud offense in Queensland in 2006 and ordered to pay $1751 with no conviction recorded.
At the time, she was also employed by NAB as a graduate intern.
Srinivas Naidu Chamakuri walked out of the court after being given a three-year jail term
Lawyers for all three previously called for leniency at sentencing, saying the offense was relatively straightforward and ultimately doomed to failure.
Todd Pickering, who represented Ms Singh, described the group's efforts as “incompetent, hopeless and ultimately unsuccessful.”
“The efforts here were very, very far from sophisticated,” he told the court.
However, Crown Prosecutor Andrew Norrie said there was a degree of sophistication as they could not have attempted this without access to internal NAB documents.
“It can't just be written off,” he said.
The case will return to court on March 21.
