Arabic version: أشلين نصيف تتجنب السجن في قضية وثيقة قرض ويستباك

According to ABC News, Ashlyn Nassif has avoided jail after securing a $150 million Westpac loan through a falsified document. The daughter of fugitive property developer Jean Nassif was sentenced to a six-month community corrections order without supervision after pleading guilty in June to publishing false misleading material to obtain advantage.

Nassif, 32, was a solicitor and an executive at Toplace, the construction company owned by her father. She sent a document that falsified the number of pre-sold units required to secure the loan. She admitted she knew some deposits were only 5 per cent of the value of the units.

Judge Christopher Halburd said Nassif was remorseful and had breached her position of trust as a solicitor. He said she was not being sentenced as a proxy for her father, but for sending one document under pressure from him. Her lawyer, Warwick Korn, told the court that her career was finished and argued that Jean Nassif’s reputation should not be a factor in assessing her offence.

After considering testimonies and a psychologist’s report, Judge Halburd described Jean Nassif as a “somewhat tyrannical father … who seems to have escaped justice”. The report said abusive pressure from her father contributed to Nassif’s depression at the time of the offence and created a dynamic in which she felt compelled to submit the fraudulent documents. The judge called the case a complex and difficult sentencing exercise, saying she would do almost anything not to disappoint her demanding father. He said a lengthy community corrections order would have been imposed if the matter had concluded years earlier, but found there was no point in supervision.