More than four years after she was first charged, a former Burnaby school bookkeeper has been found guilty of defrauding a local high school and a Vancouver real estate consulting firm.
Jodi Fingarsen was first charged with two counts of fraud over $5,000 in July 2012 in relation to incidents at Alpha Secondary School between July 2008 and July 2010 and at the Altus Group in Vancouver between July 2011 and October 2011.
She was found guilty of both counts in B.C. Provincial Court in Vancouver Thursday.
The case against Fingarsen centred around 85 cheques, including bogus Alpha Secondary cheques made out to her directly, third-party cheques made out to businesses and individuals owed money by Alpha, and third-party cheques made out to the Altus Group from clients for services rendered.
Worth a total of nearly $99,000, they were deposited into Fingarsen’s personal accounts at automated teller machines.
She, however, testified she had neither deposited the cheques nor ever noticed the thousands of extra dollars circulating through her accounts over nearly three years.
And her lawyer, John Banks, argued there was no video or photo evidence proving Fingarsen herself had made the deposits.
In his decision Thursday, Provincial Court Judge Joseph Galati acknowledged the Crown’s case, presented by prosecutor Jennifer Horneland, rested on circumstantial evidence.
But – other than Fingarsen’s testimony – he said, there was “absolutely no evidentiary basis or evidentiary gap from which to reasonably infer that Ms. Fingarsen was only responsible for those transactions (in her bank account) which do not incriminate her and that all of the other incriminating transactions were done by someone else.”
Galati went on to say Fingarsen’s testimony was “not credible” and that at times she “appeared to be making it up as she went along under cross-examination.”
“It does not raise a reasonable doubt that it was Ms. Fingarsen who deposited the Alpha cheques into her bank account. It does not raise a reasonable doubt but that Ms. Fingarsen knew she was spending money that did not belong to her,” Galati said.
More than four years after being charged, Fingarsen will now have to wait till at least the end of January to hear her fate.
Galati has ordered a pre-sentencing report with a “psychological component,” and that work is expected to take at least six weeks.
After that, Fingarsen still faces a parallel civil claim launched by the school district in 2012.
