A Surrey woman charged three years ago in connection with the alleged defrauding of a White Rock company pleaded not guilty to the offences Monday, at the start of her trial in Surrey Provincial Court.
In summarizing the case against Karen Ann Chura, Crown counsel Richard Li said Chura is charged with “crimes of dishonesty” – fraud, forgery, using forged cheques and theft over $5,000 – alleged to have occurred between March and December 2012, while contracted as a bookkeeper for Sinco Engineering Ltd.
Li told Judge Gary Cohen that during that time, Chura made 13 online bank transfers to her personal credit card from the company account and wrote 13 unauthorized cheques to herself, with the combined amount totalling nearly $60,000.
While defense counsel Edison Heba said Chura agrees that payments were made to her credit card from the company account and that she received the cheques in question, she disputes the allegations that the transactions were illegal.
The cheques were payment for hours worked, and the credit-card payments were “applied to her credit card by mistake,” Heba told Cohen.
“My client’s position is that these payments into her credit card, they were not fraudulent payments or payments with intention to defraud,” Heba said.
The cheques “were legitimate, and they’re not fraudulent.”
Chura was arrested in February 2013. At that time, police alleged a 53-year-old Clayton resident wrote cheques to herself from a company account but with no associated invoices.
Li told the court that approximately $48,000 of the monies in question have been repaid.
In testimony heard Monday morning, Dennis Johnson, owner of Sinco, told the court he contracted Chura as the company’s bookkeeper in 2008, after advertising the position on Craigslist.
Johnson said he never questioned Chura’s work performance, including the credit-card payments or the cheques she had him sign, noting the latter included cheques that were sometimes made out to her company and sometimes simply in her own name.
Asked how the two got along, Johnson said “it all went very well,” and that he never scrutinized Chura’s accounting records of the company’s business.
Asked how payments such as payroll were dealt with if Johnson was unavailable to sign cheques due to travel for business, Johnson said he typically left a number of signed blank cheques that Chura could print as needed. Those cheques were never tracked, and Johnson never had hesitations about leaving them for use during such times, he told the court.
“Never. I trusted her, totally.”
The trial is scheduled to be heard over five days.