Mukesh Sharma, Baljit ‘Bobby’ Singh and Rekha Arora defraud Australian banks to the tune of millions of dollars
Three tricksters who swindled millions of dollars from some of the country’s biggest lenders have been forced to face the music, with a Country Court judge slamming their actions. Here’s how they did it.
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Three money hungry fraudsters have been convicted of swindling millions of dollars from Australian banks by using fake documents to apply for home loans.
Mukesh Sharma, 45, and husband and wife duo Baljit “Bobby” Singh and Rekha Arora, both 37, each gained loans worth hundreds of thousands to more than a million dollars from some of the country’s biggest lenders.
Sharma fabricated employment with a false employer to defraud the National Australia Bank of $353,400 in 2012 to buy a home in Tarneit, while Singh and Arora lied about their income using bogus tax documents to gain two loans between 2011 and 2013 totalling $2.1 million from the Commonwealth Bank and Bankwest to purchase a property in Balwyn.
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The County Court heard all three were previously convicted in 2018 of running two fake schools in Reservoir and Footscray, the St Stephen Institute of Technology and the Symbiosis Institute of Technical Education.
Both schools purported to educate international students but in reality offered no classes at all, and the tricksters reaped thousands of dollars from overseas students as well as taxpayers by illegally obtaining government subsidies meant for Australian students.
County Court Judge Michael O’Connell said Singh’s criminal offending went further when he tried to pervert the course of justice when on bail for the fake schools debacle by pressuring a tradesman to lie to police about work conducted at one of the schools that was actually completed at his home.
He slammed all three for their conduct when sentencing them on November 14, telling them it undermined confidence in the country’s financial system.
“It goes without saying that the use of false documents to obtain substantial loans should be strongly discouraged,” he said.
“The everyday commercial relations which are so vitally important to our daily lives depend on all parties acting in good faith without falsifying or misrepresenting their position.”
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Sharma and Singh, who were already in prison serving five and six years respectively with a three- year non-parole period for their roles as co-directors of the scam schools, were each given three months’ jail.
Singh also copped a further five month prison sentence for trying to pervert the course of justice and one month for committing an indictable offence while on bail.
Judge O’Connell ordered the sentences be served concurrently. Arora was given a three-month suspended jail sentence to be served alongside her one year suspended jail sentence for the school scam.