Consideration
38The offences involved planned and protracted criminal activity. They involved reasonably intricate and structured arrangements which permitted the applicant to exploit the trust extended to him by Mr Pittelkow. It involved the applicant using a false instrument on two occasions and fraudulently obtaining access to $1,363,632.37, of which $246,461.25 was ultimately retained by the applicant and not subsequently recovered.
39As his Honour noted, regardless of the sums actually retained and used by the applicant, it remained the case that he availed himself of substantial sums of money at the expense of Pharmaceutical Fillers and its creditors. As his Honour also found, the return of some of the funds while these frauds were continuing simply gave the applicant scope to persist in what he was doing by minimising the risk of detection.
40The Crown emphasised that the applicant embarked on an egregious course of conduct by befriending Mr Pittelkow. While ostensibly assisting him, the applicant acquired considerable influence over Mr Pittelkow, which both enabled him to gain control of the financial side of the business and thereafter to exploit it to his own advantage. The applicant appropriated funds in order to maintain his lifestyle and further his own interests. His actions left the business financially vulnerable and caused Mr Pittelkow and his family to lose assets and resources that had been accumulated from years of hard work.
41His Honour found that the applicant was neither remorseful nor contrite. He was entitled to do so on the material before him and no challenge is mounted to that finding. His Honour imposed sentences after a trial so that any comparison with comparable cases needs to recognise the absence of any discount for a plea of guilty. There was also no favourable finding made in respect of the applicant's prospects of rehabilitation. The applicant had the benefit of a finding of special circumstances which was reflected in the overall non-parole period representing 66.6 percent of the total term.
42It seems to me that, with one exception, his Honour approached the sentencing exercise by attributing primacy to the use false instrument offences. His indicative sentence of five years for each of these offences, respectively commencing and concluding on the same date, suggests that his Honour considered that these offences were at the heart of the facilitation of the entirety of the fraudulent conduct. The indicative sentences for obtain financial advantage by deception are wholly subsumed within the indicative terms for the use false instrument offences. It is difficult in the circumstances to find fault with the way in which the indicative sentence structure adopted by his Honour deals with the relative terms for these sets of offences. Indeed, subject to the applicant's complaint that the use false instrument sentences were too long standing alone, the latest of the obtain financial advantage by deception sentences expires twelve months before the five year term for the use false instrument sentences. That total concurrency means that the applicant was effectively not sentenced to any separate term of imprisonment for the obtain financial advantage offences inasmuch as they were entirely subsumed in the sentences for the two use false instrument offences.
43The one exception to which I have referred is the way in which his Honour aggregated the sentences he proposed to impose for the deal with proceeds of crime offences in counts 16, 18, 21 and 39. The sentences for these four offences were structured to increase the overall aggregate sentence by 12 months. The applicant's complaint is that the criminality involved in these offences did not warrant sentences that had that effect, either in terms of their relative expiration dates or the length of their non-parole period, because the conduct giving rise to these charges was in reality not discretely different to that concerned with the use false instrument offences. The applicant formulates his complaint in this respect as one of double counting.
44In Thorn the following passages appear:
"[26] The second ground asserts that the sentence for the money laundering offence was excessive. The submission is that the criminality involved in this offence is less than the fraud offences and that the sentencing of the applicant was overly complicated by the use of this offence, especially as it overlapped to an extent with the fraud offences. It is further submitted that the sentence imposed is out of proportion with the penalty imposed for the other offences.
[27] This was an unusual use of a money laundering offence. To the extent that there was an overlap with the fraud offences the charge represented the use of the funds that had been dishonestly obtained under those offences. The criminality was very much in the obtaining of the funds not in their use. It is somewhat analogous to a robber being sentenced for both the robbery and being in possession of the stolen goods. But in the present case, according to the maximum penalties prescribed, the money laundering offence was more serious than the frauds by which the money was obtained. Further the money laundering charge was used to punish the applicant for his criminality arising from his partner's fraudulent conduct. As was noted earlier, there is no concept of a joint criminal enterprise under the Code, so the applicant could not be charged with his partner's fraudulent activity even though it was common activity of them both.
...
[31] But here the applicant was merely transferring the money obtained by the fraudulent claims from the company accounts to his personal account or drawing it from an ATM so that he could use it to gamble. He was doing nothing to hide the source or to change the nature of the funds. He was simply gaining access to them. The activity came within the scope of the offence under s 400.4, because the offence is so widely drawn. But it was a highly technical version of the offence.
...
[33] In my opinion his Honour should have treated this as an offence towards the lowest range of the type of offending covered by the section, even while noting, as he did, that it encompassed a number of transactions over a significant period of time. In the particular circumstances of this case the maximum penalty was not a reliable guide to the seriousness of the conduct involved: see Markarian v The Queen [2005] HCA 25; 228 CLR 357 at [30]. Further, the penalty was based upon the offender dealing with money over the value of $100,000 yet that amount was reached by including a sum of money, whatever it might have been, that overlapped with the fraud offences.
...
[35] Whether the sentence for the money laundering offence is manifestly excessive depends upon how that sentence compares with what would have been appropriate to reflect the seriousness of the dishonesty offences by which the funds had been obtained, bearing in mind that they would each have attracted a maximum penalty of 10 years imprisonment..."
45The burden of the applicant's complaint is that whereas his convictions for the proceeds of crime offences may have been technically unexceptionable and liable to attract the imposition of a sentence of imprisonment standing alone, the extent to which his overall sentence was thereby increased meant that the resultant practical sentencing outcome was unreasonable or plainly unjust.
46It is obvious that where a recipient of the proceeds of crime has been uninvolved in the crime that produced them, a deal with proceeds of crime offence will have a useful role to play. The utility of such charges in circumstances where the relevant offender is one and the same is less obvious. Nonetheless, the actual use of, or dealing with, the proceeds of crime may have an important independent significance. In the present case, the applicant defrauded his victim by the use of a false instrument. For as long as the money obtained in that way remained in the accounts set up by the applicant for that purpose, so that the transaction could be reversed, the victim had potentially suffered no irrecoverable loss. It was the use of the funds, or so much of them as were utilised or directed for the applicant's own purposes, that consummated the loss. That loss has never been recouped. In that sense at least, the effective damage was caused by the applicant's dealings with some of the proceeds of the use false instrument offences. In that way the deal with proceeds of crime offences displayed an independent criminality that was worthy of a separate penalty.
47The applicant was not sentenced to any term for the obtain financial advantage offences that resulted in any discrete period of imprisonment not otherwise subsumed within a sentence for a different offence. The applicant's Pearce complaint may in such circumstances have theoretical force but has generated no practical prejudice in the end result. The applicant's contention must therefore be considered as raising the single question of whether an aggregate head sentence of 6 years with a non-parole period of 4 years for the other offences was in all of the circumstances unreasonable or plainly unjust. On one view, his Honour's aggregate sentence was stern. A shorter head sentence and a correspondingly shorter non-parole period could certainly have withstood scrutiny in this Court. However, that is neither the point nor the proper approach.
48His Honour's reasons are expansive and clear. It is a significant aspect of his conclusions that the applicant was engaged in a planned and extensive course of criminal conduct. It was not triggered by some family crisis or other personal catastrophe, which might render his conduct explicable if not excusable. The anguish and anxiety diagnosed by Dr Furst was to a considerable extent a function of the applicant's original continuing and undetected criminal activities. The applicant's letter to his Honour was curiously self-centred and arguably lacked any degree of insight. The criminal activities in which the applicant engaged had serious practical consequences and no restoration of the loss was offered or made.
49I am not persuaded, to the extent that the applicant has been punished by the imposition of an aggregate sentence that contemplated serving any additional time beyond the sentence indicated for the use false instrument offences, that he has been doubly punished or that the sentence is therefore or in any other way unreasonable or unjust. Nor am I satisfied that the imposition of a five year term for those offences was itself beyond the bounds of a proper exercise of the sentencing discretion. It is the nature of sentencing that no one sentence is correct. It follows that the availability of a different view about the suitability or appropriateness of a sentence does not mean that error has been demonstrated. The aggregate sentence imposed by his Honour was not in my opinion manifestly excessive. It was not unreasonable or plainly unjust. I do not consider that some other sentence is warranted in law.
50In my opinion the applicant should be given leave to appeal but the appeal should be dismissed.
51McCALLUM J: I agree with Harrison J. I would add that I do not think it was necessary for the learned sentencing judge to address the issue of accumulation in the detail that he did in his indicative sentences, which included specification of the commencement and concluding date of each sentence: cf Truong v R; R v Le; Nguyen v R; R v Nguyen [2013] NSWCCA 36 at [231] per Button J (Hoeben CJ at CL and Garling J agreeing at [1] and [2]). The whole point of the introduction of a power in s 53A to impose an aggregate sentence was to remove at least one complexity in the sentencing task which was adding unnecessarily to the already substantial sentencing workload of the District and Local Courts. These remarks are not in any respect to criticise the learned sentencing judge, whose approach was detailed and precise, but only to note the permissibility of adopting a simpler approach. Section 53A(2) requires a court imposing an aggregate sentence to indicate "the sentence that would have been imposed for each offence (after taking into account such matters as are relevant under Part 3 or any other provision of this Act) had separate sentences been imposed instead of an aggregate sentence". Truong, I think, stands as authority for the proposition that, in order to comply with that provision, in the case of sentences of imprisonment, the judge need only indicate the term of imprisonment that would have been imposed for each individual offence. In doing so there is no need, in my view, for the judge to indicate the commencement date or non-parole period that would have been fixed for each individual offence