Hurricane-shutter fraudster’s prison sentence reduced to 3 years

A hurricane-shutter fitter who was jailed for five years for defrauding nine clients out of $15,400 will serve three years instead, after the Court of Appeal reduced his sentence.

Garfield Antonio Robb was convicted in September 2023 of nine counts of obtaining money by deception over a period of nearly seven years, and was sentenced in March last year by Acting Justice Frank Williams to five years behind bars.

The offences took place from May 2014 to October 2020, during which time, the court had heard, Robb had accepted money from clients, but either failed to fit the shutters or had fitted “used, old or defective” ones.

At the end of the judge-alone Grand Court trial, Robb was convicted of nine counts of obtaining money by deception, and was acquitted of four other counts of that charge. He was also ordered to compensate each of the victims.

In the subsequent sentencing hearing, the prosecution, in its written submission, had contended that Robb had effectively committed thefts that had involved a breach of trust and referred Williams to sentencing guidelines relevant to such offences. During the appeal hearing on 14 May, Robb’s lawyer Gregory Burke argued that the judge had made an error in relying on those sentencing guidelines.

He noted that the prosecution had failed to draw the judge’s attention to UK guidelines on sentencing for fraud, in the absence of specific guidelines in Cayman. Those UK guidelines indicate that, given the amounts involved and the period over which the fraud occurred, the appropriate sentence should not have exceeded three years, Burke had told the appeals court judges.

He had also argued that a compensation order should not have been made since it was apparent from a social inquiry report submitted to the court that Robb was “saddled with debt”.

The Court of Appeal judges, in their ruling, agreed with Burke’s arguments, and also determined that the trial judge had failed to take Robb’s clean criminal record into account when passing sentence.

“Having regard to the Guideline for Fraud, and the submissions made thereon by Mr. Burke, and taking into account the appellant’s lack of previous convictions, we ordered that the overall sentence of five years’ imprisonment on each of the nine counts be set aside and substituted a sentence of three years’ imprisonment on each of the nine counts, to run concurrently. We also quashed the compensation order,” the judge’s stated in their written ruling.