Jailtime for Kelowna woman who defrauded her employer of $1.2M

A Kelowna woman who stole over $1 million from her employer has been sentenced to over three years of jail time.

In February, Colleen Fay Dhuga pleaded guilty to embezzling $1.2 million while working as a controller for a company in Calgary between June 2008 and March 2014.

According to the Calgary Herald, Dhuga was sentenced to three-and-a-half-year in jails at the Calgary Provincial Court, Sept. 23.

The judge also ordered Dhuga to pay $1,190,275.01 to David Anderson, her former employer whose companies she stole the money from.

According to media reports, Dhuga had a gambling addiction when she forged 185 cheques and made cash withdrawals while working as a bookkeeper and acting as a controller for four companies Anderson owned. Using a stamp of Anderson's signature to forge the cheques, Dhuga then used the money to fund her gambling addiction.

Dhuga's lawyer Peter Hoare was retained in 2014 and shortly afterwards Dhuga confessed to stealing the money. However, it wasn't until May 2018 that Dhuga was charged with one count of fraud over $5,000, one count of theft over $5,000, and one count of laundering proceeds of crime.

At the request of her lawyer, Dhuga will serve her sentence in the Fraser Valley Institution for Women in Abbotsford so she can be closer to her family in Kelowna.

To contact a reporter for this story, email Ben Bulmer or call (250) 309-5230 or email the editor. You can also submit photos, videos or news tips to the newsroom and be entered to win a monthly prize draw.

We welcome your comments and opinions on our stories but play nice. We won't censor or delete comments unless they contain off-topic statements or links, unnecessary vulgarity, false facts, spam or obviously fake profiles. If you have any concerns about what you see in comments, email the editor in the link above.