Kumuthini Kannan: Slaver’s unsuccessful attempt to deter victim from giving evidence
A mum who forced an elderly woman into slavery is back in court after details of a phone call emerged.
A Melbourne mother who kept an elderly woman as a slave in a “terrible ordeal” has had her jail sentence extended after details of a phone call were aired in court.
Two years after Kumuthini Kannan and her husband Kandasamy Kannan were found guilty of slavery offences by a Supreme Court jury, the 55-year-old woman has returned to court after pleading guilty to a fresh charge.
Kumuthini Kannan appeared before the Victorian County Court at noon on Friday via a video link from prison, hunched over and wearing a baggy blue prison jumper.
The court was told she admitted to attempting to pervert the course of justice in May this year, just one week before a new trial was set to begin.
The charge relates to a call she made on February 16, 2020, from a public pay phone to the elderly Tamil woman she held as a slave for eight years.
She called the aged care centre where the woman, who cannot be named, was being cared for, pretending to be a court interpreter.
“Think of me as a mother,” she said.
“Do what I say. Trust me. Don’t repeat what you said earlier. The police and the lawyers are only in it to make a name for themselves.”
For an hour, the court was told, Kannan made “persistent, sustained and repetitive efforts” to convince her victim to not give evidence at trial.
While she did not make direct threats, Kannan attempted to convince the woman to distrust those around her, saying authorities would not do anything to help her and “she will rot in this country”.
“Tell the judge you had a mental illness,” Kannan said in the conversation.
The court was told the victim, then in her late 60s, was left screaming, crying and unable to sleep following the phone call.
She reported the incident to police the following day when she went to watch recordings of her police interviews, saying while she did not recognise the voice, she believed it was Kannan.
Australian Federal Police investigators would later find CCTV footage of Kannan using a public pay phone at Forest Hill Chase shopping centre when the call was made.
The couple were jailed in 2021 after a jury found they kept the woman in a state of servitude at their Glen Waverley home from 2007 to 2015.
She was discovered barely conscious in a pool of urine at the Kannans’ home in July 2015 in a “dangerous state of health”.
Sentencing Kannan, Judge Martine Marich said the offending did not involve or implicate her husband.
“It is to the complainant’s enormous credit … she showed the fortitude to give evidence,” she said.
“By contacting the principal witness you were endeavouring to defeat the justice system … in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to deter her from giving evidence.”
Judge Marich sentenced the former ANZ bank call centre employee to a term of two years and six months imprisonment for the offence, with the effect of extending her jail term by a year.
Earlier this year, both Kumuthini and Kandasamy failed in their Court of Appeal bid to overturn the conviction.