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A 45-year-old woman, who worked as a bookkeeper, was sentenced to 13 years behind bars for defrauding her former employers of R4m, the Hawks said.
The woman, Lindy Johanna Sharp, was sentenced in the Port Elizabeth Specialised Commercial Crimes Court on Friday.
According to Hawks spokesperson Captain Anelisa Feni, Sharp was employed as a bookkeeper at a Port Elizabeth-based electronics company from 2013 to 2017.
During her time as an employee there, she changed the banking details of the company's creditors to her own banking details, Feni said.
She also gave herself a "lucrative" salary and gave herself a bonus without the permission of the company's director, Feni said. The company lost an estimated R4m.
She was arrested by the Hawks' Serious Commercial Crimes Unit in November 2017.
It was reportedly not Sharp's only crime.
According to the George Herald, in 2015, she pleaded guilty to defrauding the South African Revenue Service (SARS) of R2m. She reportedly said that she realised that tax returns submitted via e-filing for tax years prior to 2008 were unlikely to get audited and implicated her friends and colleagues in her scam in the plea.
She was sentenced to eight years in prison for that offence and was serving time when she was sentenced for the bookkeeping scam on Friday, IOL reported.
