The $500,000 fraud trial of a former Cayman Turtle Centre staff member and a third-party information technology company owner, which was slated to begin this week, has been called off after the prosecution accepted guilty pleas.
At the centre of the case is Mark Manderson, who faces a single count of fraud by a public officer, to which he pleaded guilty. His co-defendant, Jeremy Alexis Williams, faces a single count of entering into an arrangement to which he pleaded guilty.
The charges stem from a series of 61 fraudulent and inflated invoices, which totalled $486,791, that was submitted by Williams through his company, Electro-City Cayman Limited, for IT products and services including security cameras and other electronics. The fraud occurred between May 2015 and November 2017.
“It is the prosecution’s case that Manderson created false invoices and/or inflated several genuine invoices to carry out his fraud on his employer,” argued prosecutor Toyin Salako.
“These invoices were presented for payment [and] the Turtle Centre paid out on these invoices by way of cheques made out to the relevant company.”
Once the money was transferred, Salako said Williams withdrew the cash and handed over the majority of the money to Manderson.
The fraud came to light in November 2017 during an audit of the Turtle Centre’s books by KPMG.
Auditors also detected an additional 39 fraudulent and/or inflated invoices, 27 of which were from Data Communication Consultants for a total of $127,325.05, with the remaining 12 from Caribbean Security Monitoring and Installation, which totalled $50,817.70.
The additional invoices resulted in Shevon Roandrew McNeil, of Data Communication Consultants, and Ian Lawrence Gayle, of Caribbean Security Monitoring and Installation, both being charged with entering into an arrangement. Both men entered not guilty pleas, and on Monday, 6 March, the prosecution offered no evidence against them, resulting in the charges being withdrawn and formal not guilty verdicts being returned.
Manderson faces an additional two counts of breach of trust, for which the prosecution said it would offer no evidence, pending the results of the sentencing for the substantive charge of fraud by a public officer.
Manderson and Williams remain on bail. Both men are due to return to court in the coming weeks for a potential Goodyear hearing, at which time the judge will state what the likely sentence will be based on a guilty plea.
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