by Vanda Carson and Mark Morri
Source: The Daily Telegraph
Published on Thursday 14 October 2011
JACKIE Dimitrovski was sipping martinis in Texas in July, unaware she was about to be sprung for an audacious $500,000 theft.
"Chocolate martini's (sic) in Dallas ... they are the best," she wrote to her friends on Facebook.
The visit was one leg of her trip of a lifetime, which included stops in Hamilton Island and Los Angeles, where she visited art galleries, posed in front of the Hollywood sign and dined in the finest restaurants.
However, while the 48-year-old accounts clerk was living it up her bosses working on the top floor of a prestigious Sydney skyscraper noticed something was amiss.
The mother of two teenage daughters yesterday pleaded guilty in Downing Centre Local Court to stealing $503,635 from the US-headquartered law firm Jones Day.
Dimitrovski, from the well-to-do suburb of Dolls Point, stole the money in six tranches between January and April this year by altering company cheques and transferring them to her husband's business account.
She then used internet banking to transfer the money to her personal account.
Her husband has not been implicated in the thefts.
She resigned from Jones Day in late July after a year working with the company.
At the time she hoped that she had covered her tracks sufficiently so her theft would never be discovered amid the million-dollar deals struck every day by the leading law firm.
But when her keen-eyed replacement took over, it was noticed a lot of money was missing and the alarm was raised.
An internal company investigation found six cheques drawn on the Jones Day Westpac account "had all been altered to be made payable" to an account in the name of her husband George's business, Foam Solutions.
They called in police, who were able to freeze $60,000 of the stolen funds, but Jones Day was still short by $440,000.
It all came crashing down when Dimitrovski returned home.
She was asked to go to North Sydney police station on August 9, where she was confronted with what she had done. By 4.30pm that afternoon she had been arrested and charged after refusing to be interviewed by police.
It was not the first time Dimitrovski had been tempted to steal.
In 2002 she was convicted of three credit card fraud charges and given a three-year good behaviour bond, according to a police statement.
Her lawyer, Nadia Long from North Strathfield firm J. H. Fisher & Sons, yesterday arranged for Dimitrovski to be bailed pending sentencing on December 2.
The magistrate said it was likely the crown would seek a "full-time custodial" sentence.
