A former bank employee’s life has been “destroyed” by “completely false” allegations she defrauded multiple banks out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, a court has been told.
Sara Daizli allegedly opened accounts in fictitious names in order to swindle hundreds of thousands of dollars from St George Bank customers between February 2016 and December 2018.
Prosecutors allege she siphoned money into the fake accounts and used the ill-gotten gains to fund a lavish lifestyle.
The 32-year-old is also accused of making fraudulent loan applications to St George and ANZ banks.
She has pleaded not guilty to a staggering 120 charges, including dealing with the proceeds of a crime and 108 counts of dishonestly gaining a financial advantage by deception.
On Thursday, Ms Daizli’s lawyer Abigail Bannister told the court her client’s life “has been destroyed over the past four years” due to the “completely false” allegations of fraud.
Ms Daizli is due to face a trial in the NSW District Court next month but she fronted court this week for an argument about subpoenas issued to Westpac Bank.
The court was told Westpac, which is now the parent company of Ms Daizli’s former employer St George Bank, has spent countless hours and tens of thousands of dollars tracking down documents sought by the defence.
Westpac’s lawyer Andrew Byrne asked the court to set aside portions of the subpoenas that he argued were oppressive and constituted an illegitimate application of the legal process.
He said the bank has been “bending over backwards” to provide the requested documents, but emphasised the time and cost involved in searching through the “hundreds of millions of pieces of evidence”.
One of the records sought by Ms Daizli’s lawyer Abigail Bannister is a record of the staff login details for 19 days when her client is accused of conducting fraudulent transfers.
Ms Bannister said it was a “very critical document” because prosecutors allege Ms Daizli had obtained the login details of several colleagues and used them to appropriate funds on 19 occasions.
She told the court the bank’s policy dictated that employees could be immediately dismissed for sharing login details and they weren’t even allowed to write them down.
Ms Daizli would have had to obtain her colleague’s sensitive login details and then monitor the employee from a different room to ensure they weren’t logged in when she made the fraudulent transactions, Ms Bannister told the court.
She suggested it was possible the St George staffers had innocently conducted the transfers themselves after someone came into the bank and misrepresented themselves.
Ms Bannister said the scenario “leaves the door open” for the possibility that Ms Daizli was also an innocent victim of an unknown fraudster who conned her into opening fake accounts.
“For us to see the logins is absolutely crucial,” she stressed.
Yet Mr Byrne argued it would take an “extraordinary amount of time” to conduct the necessary searches of Westpac’s extensive records because they aren’t “a straightforward process”.
Judge Nanette Williams ordered Westpac to “take all reasonable steps” to produce the login records.
However she set aside a request for a chronological log of the transactions conducted by the bank staffers on the same days, dismissing it as “way too wide”.
Ms Bannister also requested a record of the high achieving employees at St George Bank during Ms Daizli’s three year tenure as a customer service specialist.
Judge Williams ordered Westpac to produce the documents by August 19, waving off Ms Bannister’s argument that eight weeks had elapsed since Westpac first said it would take 10 days to produce the documents.
“I don’t care, Ms Bannister. I care about getting the material … to you as soon as possible,” the judge said.
Other defence requests, such as for copies investigator’s interviews with staff members in relation to the fraud, were dismissed by Judge Williams for being too broad.
She ordered the parties to return to court on August 19 so Westpac could report on its progress with producing the approved documents.
“This trial is not going to be derailed by the subpoena matters,” the judge declared.
“It’s going to go ahead in September.”
Ms Daizli is on bail under strict conditions, which include a $1,050,000 surety to guarantee she appears in court when required.
She is also facing civil proceedings brought by Westpac Bank in relation to her alleged fraud.
