The 30-year-old Natascha Faul was moved to tears at times as she pleaded with Magistrate Gert Retief yesterday not to send her to prison but to allow her to return to her husband and two daughters after more than five months in custody.

Her children are two years old and a little short of six years old now, and are at a stage where they really need her presence, Faul said when she asked the court to sentence her to do some sort of community service for the theft she admitted having committed last year.

Her wish was not granted, though.

Instead, the Magistrate sentenced her to seven years' imprisonment, of which two years were suspended for five years on condition that Faul is not again found guilty of theft in that period.

Faul was sentenced on 19 counts of theft, to which she had admitted guilt.

She admitted that on 19 occasions between May 17 and July 30 last year she stole money from her then employer, Ark Trading.

The total amount that she took reached N$424 428,43.

An out-of-control gambling habit was what led to the thefts in the first place, the court heard.

In fact, psychiatrist Reinhardt Sieberhagen told the Magistrate that her compulsion to gamble had reached such proportions that he had diagnosed her as having a "pathological gambling disorder" - in short, she is a gambling addict, unable to control the urge to entrust large sums of money to the whims of Lady Luck.

Faul told the Magistrate that she had first been introduced to gambling on a holiday in South Africa when she was 14 years old.

Her gambling habit became worse from the start of 2004, she related.

In April last year she won a large amount, but she lost this again, got irritated and tried to win it back once more, she said.

She never managed to do so, but in the process had started taking money from her job to enable her to continue trying her luck at the casino.

By early June last year, she tried to resign from her job at Ark Trading, where she was an accountant.

That was because she wanted to get away from the temptation of handing large amounts of money.

At that stage she had already taken about N$70 000 of the company's money.

Ark Trading's owner however refused to accept her resignation and required her to continue working until the end of July.

In that time the thefts snowballed.

Whereas she had started off by stealing the relatively small sum of N$5 973 on May 17 last year, her need for more money quickly ballooned to the point where she took identical amounts of N$31 990 on six occasions between June 12 and July 30.

She could not stop herself from taking more money each time, Faul told the Magistrate.

Each time she would tell herself that she could not take more money, but each time she would also think that perhaps she could win back what she had lost, she related.

She never won it back, though.

Yesterday she also lost much more than just the money she had gambled away.

Faul's defence lawyer, Hennie Barnard, had asked the Magistrate to have mercy on his client.

"Mercy distinguishes us from the rest of creation," he stated.

The Magistrate however reminded Faul that the court was sitting as a judge on behalf of society, and as such had to take into account the interests of society.

This would include employers' need to be able to trust their employees, he indicated.

Where an employee breached the trust that was placed in him or her, it was the duty of the courts to send out the message that such conduct would be severely punished, Magistrate Retief stated.

Public Prosecutor Dominic Lisulo represented the State at Faul's trial.

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