A 50-year-old mother of two sons from Melbourne, with different personalities, lost more than $7.8 million of her employer’s money to gamble online and has been sentenced to eight years.
Wendy Hope Jobson, pleaded guilty in the Victorian Supreme Court to six counts of theft from the Victorian hotel chain the Koroneos Group, where she had been working for the past 16 years.
As the Herald Sun reports, Psychiatrist Dr Sylvia Solinski told the court on April 29 that the Leopold woman suffered from dissociative identity disorder and had at least 10 different personalities. According to Solinski, Jobson was out of touch with reality when she stole the money and gambled most of it on an online poker machine called Dr Love, saying: “I’m not sure who the ‘she’ was that did that.”
Solinski also said that the symptoms of Jobson’s mental illness included hearing rapid alternating voices in her head and often referring to herself in the third person.
However, Supreme Court Justice Phillip Priest said he did not accept that it was the disorder which caused Jobson’s gambling or that it reduced her moral culpability for the crimes.
“You were fully aware of what you were doing,” he told her. “Moreover, your claim that you did not know what you were doing does not sit well with your actions in deliberately covering up your thefts through false accounting.” he said.
Jobson, was originally charged for 1,410 separate transactions, but pleaded guilty to six counts representing the sum she stole for each year between 2006 and 2011.
The Justice Priest said that the group’s managing director Mitchell Koroneos, who was the fraud’s victim, was unlikely to ever recover the funds from the now bankrupt Jobson, whom he once considered a “trusted friend and worker”.
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