A FORMER administrative clerk of a consumer goods wholesaler at Walvis Bay was sentenced to five years in prison on Friday, three weeks after she was found guilty on 18 counts of fraud involving close to N$1,7 million.
Judge Alfred Siboleka sentenced Venecia Ann Koning (46) in the Windhoek High Court to 12 years’ imprisonment, of which seven years were suspended for five years on condition that Koning was not convicted again of fraud during the period of suspension.
Koning denied guilt on all charges when her trial started in November 2011. Having been pronounced guilty, she told the judge she was sorry that her former employer, wholesaler Indo Atlantic, had suffered a financial loss as a result of the theft of cigarettes from its stock, but also maintained she had only done her job before she was arrested and charged. She did not sell the cigarettes that disappeared from the company’s warehouse, she said.
Koning stood trial with a former colleague, Dawid Martin Bezuidenhout (51), who was acquitted when judge Siboleka delivered his verdict on 7 September.
The state alleged that during the time they were employed by Indo Atlantic at Walvis Bay they defrauded the company of about N$2,5 million through inflating the quantity of cigarettes delivered to some coastal shops that were customers of the company, or by making out invoices to shops for cigarettes never delivered to them.
The charges on which Koning was convicted involved fraud committed between October 2006 and August 2007.
Bezuidenhout was employed as a sales representative, while Koning worked as an administrative assistant at the company.
When he delivered his verdict judge Siboleka recounted that according to the evidence he heard during the trial, Koning was in charge of stock at the Indo Atlantic warehouse where cigarettes were stored, and was also responsible for generating invoices that were supposed to reflect deliveries to customers and payments made for delivered goods.
The 18 charges on which she was convicted related to invoices issued to customers for cigarettes that they said they never received. Koning admitted that she prepared all of those invoices, but insisted she must have done so based on orders placed by the customers, the judge noted.
The 18 charges involved the alleged disappearance and fake sales of cigarettes worth about N$1,69 million.
After being convicted, Koning told the court she was not in a position to reimburse Indo Atlantic for the loss it suffered. She did not previously apologise to the company because she did not think she would be found guilty, she also said.
Titus Ipumbu, instructed by the Directorate of Legal Aid, represented Koning during her trial. State advocate Simba Nduna prosecuted.
