Deloraine woman gets house arrest for fraud

A Deloraine woman who stole more than $53,000 from two community-based organizations was sentenced to just under two years of house arrest.

Liza Park, 45, pleaded guilty to two counts of fraud over $5,000 after she embezzled more than $35,000 from Deloraine Minor Ball Association and more than $18,000 from Prairie Gateway Tourism.

“She looked these people in the eye. She had meals with them. She sat beside them at games and cheered along with them, all the while she was stealing from them,” Crown attorney Ron Toews said in a Killarney provincial courtroom last Tuesday.

In September 2023, the Town of Virden’s chief administrative officer reported an ongoing fraud at Prairie Gateway Tourism.

Police were able to access spreadsheets that revealed roughly $16,000 of possible fraudulent transactions, the court heard.

A couple of months later, the town provided a statement to Virden RCMP.

Park was employed full-time with the Town of Virden economic development office for four years, ending in April 2021, Toews said. She remained contracted with Prairie Gateway Tourism from April 2021 to September 2023.

During this time, Toews said Park was in charge of the finances and worked remotely from home, where she kept the financial books. She was also the only person authorized to access the organization’s online banking account.

The thefts took place from March 2022 to September 2023, with Park e-transferring money to herself, Toews said. The fraud totalled more than $18,000.

In the other fraud case, Deloraine Minor Ball president Paul Artz read a community impact statement to the court outlining the effects Park’s theft of more than $35,000 over an extensive period had on the organization.

Park was the treasurer for the volunteer-led organization for about a decade, Artz said.

He said Deloraine Minor Ball became aware that money wasn’t going where it was supposed to after a business notified them of an outstanding bill.

When they found out Park had been lining her own pockets, he said they felt shocked, frustrated, angry and betrayed.

“The number of kids affected by her actions are sizable,” Artz said. “The immediate financial impact was the money taken from the kids and family over the period of many years, not to mention that the players … did without or used outdated, unsafe equipment because Deloraine Minor Ball was consistently broke.”

He said there are about 100 kids in Deloraine Minor Ball every year.

The bank could only track the thefts back to 2017, since that’s as far back as it could go in its system.

“The cash that was taken without the ability to accurately track will be the biggest mystery,” Artz said. “We will never know how much money was stolen due to no books being turned over.”

Artz said the team constantly held fundraisers and “naively thought” that’s what it took to break even.

Toews said these types of thefts seem to be becoming a pattern.

“This is the third time I’ve been involved in a theft of this nature in the last 14 months,” he said.

The two other people he was referring to received conditional sentences, which means they serve the sentence from their home under strict conditions.

“It’s clear that conditional sentences aren’t providing the community with the level of deterrence and denunciation that one would hope for,” he said before recommending that Park spend 15-18 months behind bars for her offences.

Defence lawyer Anthony Dawson said Park gave the money to him in full to pay restitution to the organizations she defrauded. He said she is remorseful for her actions and wrote a letter of apology.

Dawson said Park was dealing with the pressures of being the only person in her household bringing in money and an alcohol addiction she has had since she was a teenager.

“All of that combined brought a lot of pressure to bear on Miss Park, and she ended up failing under that pressure and defrauding the organization,” he said. “She is ashamed and embarrassed for her actions, to the point where she has moved out of Deloraine, where she had been living for her entire life up to that point.”

He said Park has since managed her issues with alcohol on her own.

Park came to court with letters of support from her mother, a friend of hers in the community and her current employer — something Dawson said speaks to her character.

He asked the court to impose a similar sentence in the range of 18 months to two years less a day, but to be served from her home.

He said conditional sentences still send the message of deterrence and denunciation and are “extremely onerous.”

When Park was given the chance to speak, she apologized for her actions.

“I am truly sorry for the trust I broke and the harm I caused to the organizations that exist to serve others,” she said. “What I did was wrong, and I understand the seriousness of my actions.”

Judge John Combs told Park she had a lot of time to consider her actions and said her “long-lasting pattern of thefts” affected many people.

“These types of matters involve not single actions, but numerous, and every time that you wrote a cheque or conducted a transaction that involved money going to you was an individual act of theft,” he said.

Combs said he was satisfied that a conditional sentence would send the message of deterrence.

He sentenced Park to a conditional sentence of just under two years.

» sanderson@brandonsun.com