A financial boss has told how he fleeced a prestigious Jewish school of $7.4m and splashed it on fast cars, holidays and his $625k-a-year pokie habit.
The dramatic downfall of the prestigious Jewish Orthodox Moriah College’s former financial controller, Augustine ‘Gus’ Nosti, has hit free fall with him confessing to a string of fraud offences from which he netted $7.4 million.
The fraudster began swindling cash almost as soon as he began at the eastern suburbs school in 2004, at times simply transferring money into his personal bank accounts.
The agreed statement of facts tendered to Downing Centre Local Court on Thursday revealed Nosti transferred $3.4 million to himself across 363 separate transactions since December 2004.
Between August 2015 and his resignation in March 2019, he redirected 39 GST tax refunds – worth $3.9 million – away from Moriah College’s finances to his own bank accounts.
The NSW Supreme Court heard during a civil case last year between Moriah College and Nosti that the former financial controller – whose salary rose from $90,000 to $186,000 during his tenure – funded a life of luxury holidays, fast cars, speed boats and multimillion-dollar binges on the pokies as a result of the fraud.
Court documents reveal how the financial freedoms given to Nosti was simply too much of a temptation to the Hornsby Heights man.
“I had a fairly severe gambling problem and I was always trying to find money to fund the gambling and I found a loophole” he told detectives on his arrest, court documents state. “At the end of the day, I found a loophole and I took advantage of it.”
Read the article by Daniel McGookin in The Daily Telegraph.