Man jailed for Matrix of lies in Canon fraud
Man jailed for Matrix of lies in Canon fraud
An Australian man has been jailed for pretending that his company supplied Canon computer equipment, costing bus line McCafferty's millions of dollars through phoney acquisitions.
John Michael Parker, from Toowoomba, has sentenced him to 31/2 years' in jail, to be suspended after nine months for four years for charging McCafferty's $2.5 million over the last five years.
Parker was the director of Matrix, an office equipment company, which had exclusive rights in the 80s to supply Canon equipment to the Toowoomba district.
It was discovered in 1997 that the price of the goods were inflated and Matrix technicians, not Canon, built them although the company label was on the goods.
Matrix provided, what it described as, "super file servers" and accessories, for a total of $523,000, saying it was Canon's best equipment from Japan.
It continued to deliver file servers to McCafferty's with a series of file servers, which cost the bus, company thousands a month in fees.
The fraud was found out when McCafferty's contacted Canon to find out how much money it owed under its agreement, but Canon replied by stating that it knew nothing about the agreement.
The bus company successfully sued Matrix for $3.9 million, but did not receive this in full because Parker's company was forced into bankruptcy.
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