A used car salesman who scammed his boss out of $259,000 has been sent to jail for a year by a B.C. Supreme Court judge.
Alireza Toraj Zolnasr, 42, was sales manager of the used car lot for Pacific Honda in North Vancouver and lived in the British Properties when he began a convoluted scheme to defraud his employer in 2005.
The scam involved creating phony paperwork, including falsifying purchase agreements, while buying and selling used cars from various wholesaler lots. In some cases cheques written by the wholesalers were never deposited with Pacific Honda. In others, Zolnasr sold cars while still recording them as inventory on the car lot.
The ruse was only discovered after one of the wholesalers called Pacific Honda and tipped the company off to the fraud. When they checked, bosses found 30 vehicles unaccounted for.
Crown counsel Kevin Marks told the judge the breach of trust was a shock to the business owners and other employees.
Zolnasrs defence lawyer Michael Tammen said Zolnasr only resorted to the fraud because he was under tremendous pressure to move stock on the used car lot and found himself unable to sell the cars at a profit.
If he hadnt inflated the figures, he would probably have been fired, said Tammen. Theres a real pressure on a used car salesman to move those cars.
He asked the judge for a conditional sentence order, saying Zolnasr was more likely to pay back the money he owed if he could continue working.
In handing down the jail sentence, however, Justice Peter Wilcock said he had to take into account the deliberate nature of the fraud. It involved much deceit, was complicated and difficult to investigate.
The judge noted that although Zolnasr was fired from his job at Pacific Honda, he did go back to work at other used car businesses, most recently running his own one-man outfit.
In addition to the jail sentence, the judge ordered Zolnasr to pay back $77,000 to Pacific Honda the amount he still owes under a civil agreement with the company.
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