An accountant who admitted to defrauding a Burnaby company that sells mobility aids of more than $100,000 has avoided jail because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In September 2017, Fangjie Li, 37, was an accountant at the Burnaby branch of Motion Specialities, a national chain of stores specializing in products and services to aid mobility, according to a B.C. provincial court ruling this fall.
On Sept. 15, 2017, the company’s regional manager and branch manager met with Li and asked for his help investigating “anomalies” related to two credit cards.
At that meeting, Li confessed it was he who had committed the fraud.
“At that stage, the company was aware of $30,000 worth of fraudulent refunds through that credit card or the two credit cards and their transactions,” states the court ruling. “Mr. Li told them he believed the sum to be closer to $60,000 or $70,000.”
In the end, a forensic audit determined Li had defrauded the company of $102,658.68 over 17 months.
Li confessed to the RCMP in June 2018.
He pleaded guilty to the fraud last December and paid back the stolen money in three payments between March 4 and Aug. 25 of this year.
At sentencing, his lawyer called for a suspended sentence and three years of probation, noting his confession, guilty plea, remorse, restitution and lack of criminal record.
Crown prosecutor Bridget Petherbridge acknowledged Li’s guilty plea was a factor in his favour but argued it should be given less weight because Li appeared to have been “inescapably caught.”
She noted Li’s fraud was not an impulsive action but a persistent fraud that went on for some time.
Petherbridge called for a six-month jail term.
Provincial court Judge Gregory Rideout said the prosecutor’s submissions were “quite appropriate” but said there were two things that made Li’s case a “difficult sentencing matter.”
First, he said the case had taken too long.
“The accused confessed on September 15, 2017, and again on June 9, 2018,” Rideout said. “The Information was not laid until the 9th of September, 2019. We are now into October of 2020; over three years have gone by. That is unfortunate. I am not casting blame anywhere, but sometimes long becomes too long, and this has become too long.”
The second “special circumstance” Rideout noted was that judges are no longer able to impose intermittent jail sentences (sentences that allow the offender to serve their sentence a little at a time, such as on weekends) because of the pandemic.
Rideout said he would have imposed an intermittent sentence in Li’s case to deter others from committing similar crimes, but the sentence was not available to him.
In the end, he handed Li a three-year suspended sentence with a number of conditions, including a curfew for the first 45 days of the sentence and 50 hours of community service.
Li has also been ordered to show a copy of his probation order to any future employers or organizations before getting a job or volunteer position that involves handling anyone else’s money or property.
Rideout said the special circumstances in Li’s case distinguished it from “what would be a usual or general sentence of imprisonment.”
“I expect the circumstances here are going to be rare in other cases,” he said.
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