NZ News
Stolen-car chop-shop boss Abdul Ahmadi fails in bid to cut jail term
A jailed “chop-shop” owner who received $800,000 in stolen cars has failed to get his sentence reduced, just months after losing millions in property to the Crown.
Abdul Karim Ahmadi was sentenced in the Christchurch District Court on 12 November to three years and three months in prison, having pleaded guilty to 18 charges of receiving, and representative charges of failing to keep dealer’s records and failing to keep articles in an unaltered state.
Within two weeks of his sentencing, the High Court gave police a green light to sell two of Ahmadi’s Wellington wrecking yards, worth a combined $1,790,000, after an application for restraining orders under the Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Act.
Ahmadi appealed his jail sentence, submitting that the starting point of five years was too high.
The High Court has now dismissed that appeal.
In a recently released decision, Ahmadi’s lawyer Philip McDonnell submitted that the sentencing judge, Judge Quentin Hix, had adopted an “overtly formulated approach”, contending it was not the most serious case of its kind.
McDonnell said a starting point of four to four-and-a-half years in prison was appropriate.
The summary of facts showed stolen vehicles, including several of high value, would be delivered to Ahmadi’s Christchurch yard, promptly dismantled and then shipped overseas, most commonly to the United Arab Emirates.
He received 38 stolen vehicles between May 2022 and March 2024 and was jointly charged with a co-defendant, who faces several related charges alleging similar offending arising from operations in Christchurch and Wellington.
Abdul Ahmadi appears for sentencing in the Christchurch District Court. Photo: Al Williams / NZME
McDonnell submitted that as a consequence of the summary of facts summarising the alleged offending by Ahmadi and a co-defendant, there was a “real risk the judge wrongly assessed” Ahmadi’s culpability, having relied on actions and/or offences committed solely by the co-defendant.
He submitted that Ahmadi was the less culpable offender, highlighting the theft of four new Toyota Land Cruisers, which according to the summary of facts were received and paid for by the co-defendant.
In sentencing Ahmadi, Judge Hix considered that the nature of the operation, the values involved, and the duration of the offending put the offending at the top end in terms of culpability.
With reference to a maximum sentence of seven years’ imprisonment, a starting point of five years’ imprisonment was adopted to reflect the offending.
Judge Hix applied a 25 percent discount for guilty pleas and allowed a 10 percent deduction for the combined factors of past trauma, good character and prospects of rehabilitation.
McDonnell said the judge should have given discounts of 10 percent for previous good character, 10 percent for a cultural report and 5 percent for rehabilitation prospects.
He submitted that the appropriate end sentence was close to two years, accounting for a four-and-a-half-year starting point reduced by 50 percent for personal mitigating factors.
Crown lawyer Grace Collett said the five-year starting point was generous considering the sophistication and scale of the operation and Ahmadi’s role.
Collett accepted that the co-defendant was more culpable, but said that reflected the extent of the alleged offending at the Wellington operation.
The Christchurch offending was under Ahmadi’s secondhand dealer licence and he regularly offended independently of the co-defendant, she said.
Collett said Ahmadi was entitled to a good character credit, but the level of deduction had to be tempered with the premeditated and prolonged nature of the offending.
In his appeal decision, Justice Jonathan Eaton said Judge Hix was not constrained by a seven-year maximum and that it would have been open to adopt a starting point higher than the starting maximum for a single offence of receiving.
Justice Eaton said Ahmadi offended within a joint criminal enterprise, and in those circumstances, it was not necessary or appropriate for Judge Hix to distinguish Ahmadi’s culpability from that of his co-defendant.
“I consider the starting point of five years’ imprisonment to be very much at the bottom of the available range. It was not excessive.”
Justice Eaton dismissed the appeal.
This story was first published by the New Zealand Herald.
Source: RNZ
Latest News
Opportunities to mitigate multi-million-dollar RNZ budget blowout likely missed – experts
Multiple opportunities to identify and mitigate a multi-million-dollar budget blowout at RNZ appear have been missed, according to the former executive director at Audit New Zealand.
The public broadcaster on Monday revealed a near $12 million shock financial loss after a litany of financial blunders, which will now lead to sweeping job cuts.
The $11.8m loss is more than 25 times the $470,000 RNZ had expected to lose over the year to June.
CEO Paul Thompson took responsibility for the result, and said internal reports gave an inaccurate picture of the finances, meaning the scale of the loss only became clear in October.
RNZ’s former chief financial officer Hilary Parker resigned unexpectedly in early October.
The board said it would commission an independent review into what went wrong.
Independent contractor Stephen Walker, who left the Audit Office earlier this year, said the size of the loss was surprising, as was the length of time it took to identify it – months after the financial year ended.
Supplied / OAG
“Probably more of a concern is that they had seemingly been unaware that they were running up a significant deficit until they were in the preparation stage of their annual report in October.”
Walker said public entities typically produced monthly financial reports.
An interim audit also took place before the end of the financial year, he said, but if the organisation hadn’t identified significant losses at that stage, the auditor could also be in the dark.
“It seems that there’s a real weakness in forecasting and budgeting that’s occurred here and that the monthly accounts, when they’re produced, either haven’t identified these significant variances against budget or the magnitude of them really hasn’t come to light until right towards the end of the financial year,” Walker said.
“And really at that point, there’s no opportunity for the chief executive, the leadership team to take, and the board to take, any corrective action because the year has effectively been completed.”
Walker said the “significant miss” was difficult to account for given it was more than 10 percent of RNZ’s total funding.
He said based on RNZ’s annual report, financial complexity didn’t appear to be a factor.
“This $11.8m loss isn’t made up of one particular item … it seems to have been contributed to by a number of separate expense lines running over budget. So I don’t think it’s necessarily to do with complexity.”
Among the errors, RNZ wrongly counted $2m from land sales as income in its budget. Staff costs also came in $3.2m over budget, including $1.4m in redundancy payments.
Professor at Auckland University’s business school Norman Wong said based on media reports the issues identified were “significant and troubling”.
Supplied / University of Auckland
“But recognising the sale of land as income in their budget is a basic error that one would have expected to have been caught and corrected well before it got to this point.”
With funding reductions at RNZ over the past two years, Walker expected greater scrutiny of financial results.
“Virtually every public entity has had their annual budget reduced. And so you would expect … the leadership team on a monthly basis and board – I’m not sure how frequently the board will consider the information – but you would expect them to be interrogating the results on a regular basis throughout the year,” he said.
Walker said initiating an independent review was the correct course of action and that he’d want to understand what information the leadership team and the board were regularly receiving.
He said he’d “love to say” surprising financial results were rare, but conceded they occured on a semi-frequent basis during his time leading the Audit Office.
“The benefit of independent scrutiny by the Audit Office – and the auditors providing that support to the Auditor General – [is] that the reporting is fairly presented at the end of the year, whether it’s good, bad or ugly.”
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