The trial of a book-keeper charged with stealing more than $700,000 from a roofing firm after being hired to manage the company’s accounts started yesterday.

Bambi Lee Pimental has pleaded not guilty to three counts of theft, fraudulent false accounting, and using criminal property while employed by J W Gray and Company Ltd between June 29, 2016 and June 4, 2020.

The jury heard evidence against her during the morning session – including what the prosecution described as a recorded confession she made to her boss after being confronted by him.

Opening the case for the Crown, prosecutor Adley Duncan said that Ms Pimental had sole control of the company’s accounts and had “cooked the books”, siphoning off $706,436 over four years.

Company owner Jonathan Gray was the first prosecution witness to testify.

He said that his wife had previously managed the company’s accounts, but Ms Pimental, who was a neighbour of the couple, was drafted in after Mrs Gray stepped down in January 2016.

He said that Ms Pimental, 54, had worked on an “ad hoc” basis for about a year before that.

Mr Gray told the court that Ms Pimental was responsible for preparing invoices, paying bills and calculating the weekly payroll.

She was hired as a subcontractor rather than a company employee and was expected to work 25 hours a week at an hourly rate of $40.

He said: “We allowed her to pay herself as she was in charge of payroll.

“For me she represented herself as a professional, which assured me that professional trust was in place.”

Mr Gray said that he and his wife’s relationship with Ms Pimental developed after she started working for the company and his firm repaired Ms Pimental’s roof free of charge.

Mr Gray said that his firm had “a good book of business and a full schedule of work”.

However, he eventually became concerned that the company “never seemed to have much money”, despite introducing cost-saving measures.

“There was a positive cashflow but not to the extent I would have expected, given the amount of effort everyone was putting in,” he said.

In June of 2020, Mr Gray decided to examine the company’s accounts “just to see what was going on”.

He said: “We discovered that Bambi was paying herself more than we had agreed to and much more frequently.”

Mr Gray said that company bank records showed that in a single month – January 2020 – Ms Pimental had made nine payments into her personal account totalling $20,000. Her agreed salary was $1,000 per week.

He concluded that Ms Pimental had paid herself an estimated $180,000 more than she had been entitled to over the four years.

However, Mr Gray said that “in subsequent weeks, we continued looking at the accounts and discovered treacherous activity where over $500,000 was stolen by a different method”.

Mr Gray claimed that Ms Pimental had taken a screenshot of the company’s payroll list of employees and fraudulently added her name to it, creating another route in which she could send funds from the company’s Butterfield account to her private account.

Mr Gray said that he decided to confront Ms Pimental after the initial discrepancy came to light. He recorded their conversation, which was played to the jury.

Mr Gray could be heard asking Ms Pimental to explain why she had transferred company funds into her account so frequently.

At one point he was heard to ask: “What the hell is going on?”

In response, Ms Pimental initially claimed that there must have been “a mistake”, and she would try to “figure it out”, before finally agreeing with Mr Gray that it “makes no sense”.

Ms Pimental then claimed that her tenant had owed her money and that there were “a lot of things going on”. She claimed that she always intended to repay the money and would work for free to pay off the debt.

“I have never done this before,” she was heard to say. “I want to pay it off. Please give me an opportunity to right it,” she added.

Under cross-examination by defence lawyer Victoria Greening, Mr Gray denied that he had asked Ms Pimental to work beyond her regular hours and perform duties beyond bookkeeping.

Ms Greening suggested that Ms Pimental had covered various tasks including customer management and project management and had also worked as a personal assistant – all at much higher rates of pay then her regular $40 per hour.

She produced e-mails written by Ms Pimental which demonstrated that she worked longer than her five-hour shift.

Mr Gray also denied that the company had agreed to give Ms Pimental several loans worth more than $26,000 in 2016 and 2019.

The case, before Puisne Judge Juan Wolffe, resumes today.

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