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This was published 1 year ago
The former financial controller of a Sydney school has been jailed for at least five-and-a-half years after he stole $7.4 million of the school’s funds to feed his gambling addiction.
Augustine Nosti, 58, started working for Moriah College – an independent co-educational Jewish school in the city’s eastern suburbs – in January 2004. That year, he began siphoning college funds into his own accounts.
Moriah College at Queen’s Park in Sydney’s east.Credit:Louise Kennerley
Over a 14-year period, Nosti misappropriated $7,408,777.43 by abusing the broad access which had been given to him to organise the school’s financial affairs, including paying wages and superannuation.
The money was stolen in hundreds of transactions, including by changing details in the school’s tax portal to redirect $3,993,341.46 of GST refunds into his own account instead of the school’s.
Nosti’s deception was discovered after he left the school in 2019, and a new financial controller was unable to account for where the money had gone. A forensic accountant was called in.
In a police interview in 2020, Nosti admitted to stealing the money. He told detectives at Waverley police station that he had a gambling addiction, and estimated he would put $10,000 to $12,000 a week through poker machines.
On Wednesday, NSW District Court Judge Karen Robinson jailed Nosti for nine years with a non-parole period of five years and six months.
She said Nosti took money from the school with “systemic regularity”, in an “unsophisticated” and “easily detected” series of actions he explained as being linked to his gambling addiction.
“He said he decided to do this as he had a fairly severe gambling problem and was always trying to find money to fund the gambling. He found a loophole, and took advantage of it,” Judge Robinson said.
“Ninety-five per cent of the money was spent on gambling, but he did other things with the money.”
Nosti told police he did not start the job intending to defraud the college, but formed that intention during his first year of employment.
Judge Robinson said Nosti was aware in about 2001 that he had issues with gambling, but still chose to take a job that gave him access to a large amount of funds.
“The gambling addiction, although substantial and long-standing, is not a mitigating factor on sentence, nor is it a factor that reduces the moral culpability of the offender,” Judge Robinson said.
She found Nosti has shown genuine remorse, including offering an early guilty plea to five counts of dishonestly obtaining financial advantage by deception, co-operating with police, and engaging in counselling for gambling.
Judge Robinson said Nosti has not gambled since his crimes were discovered, which is one of the factors that suggest he has good prospects for rehabilitation.
In a statement, Moriah College president Stephen Jankelowitz said the school undertook a “painstaking process of independent forensic and financial investigation that has been ongoing for close to two years”.
“The fraud perpetrated against Moriah by Gus Nosti shocked the school community. It was a fraudulent and devastating betrayal,” Mr Jankelowitz said.
“While justice has been served today, this process has taken a significant toll on the College as a whole. However, with these criminal proceedings now behind us, we look to the future with optimism.”
Mr Jankelowitz described the school’s attempts to recover the money as “ongoing”.
Moriah took civil action against Nosti and his then-wife in the NSW Supreme Court last year in an attempt to recover the funds, with Nosti ordered to repay $7,337,282 plus interest.
Justice David Hammerschlag found in the civil proceedings that Nosti gave his wife up to $2000 a fortnight in cash, but she had “no inkling” of where it had truly come from and thought it was poker machine winnings.
“He duped her, and he deftly kept her from knowing anything that would create true suspicion,” Justice Hammerschlag said last year. “In different ways, [the school and his wife] are both the objects of Gus’s treachery.”
Nosti will be eligible for parole in February 2027.
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