A Sydney businessman accused of frauds of $5.5 million sent a picture of a coffin to an alleged victim, threatened another with "maximum harm" and called their lawyer "a dead man".
How a fake accountant stole millions of dollars to fund his extravagant lifestyle
Fake accountant George Dimitriou is a serial conman who stole millions of dollars from his clients by fabricating tax returns, backdating documents and forging their signatures on loan applications, the proceeds of which he diverted to support his extravagant lifestyle.
A former ANZ loans manager has confessed to forging the signature of at least one of Dimitriou’s clients on loan documents.
Also aiding Dimitriou in his criminal endeavours were several lawyers, including the late Hector Ekes, an alcoholic with a raging ice addiction who was also a former bankrupt who had been banned for five years for professional misconduct.
In Dimitriou’s office in Bella Vista, in Sydney’s Hills district, clients recall seeing his framed accountancy qualifications hanging on the wall.
But Dimitriou, 55, did not have an accountancy degree or even a certificate enabling him to offer financial advice. After leaving school in Year 10, he ran a garden artistry business.
From 2010, Dimitriou preyed upon vulnerable people experiencing financial problems by promoting himself as an experienced accountant who could reorganise their financial affairs. For his victims, the results were catastrophic. They lost their businesses, houses and cars. Some lost their marriages and many were left destitute.
“I am broken, just broken,” said Lepa Sanna, from the Central Coast in NSW, who was left bankrupt after Dimitriou manufactured loan documents and forged her and her husband’s signatures on numerous documents, including on the sale of their house at Copacabana.
Later, Dimitriou tried to rely on a false affidavit presented to the court in which Sanna’s signature was again forged. The affidavit claimed she had not received the bankruptcy notice because she was institutionalised in a mental health facility. This was a lie.
“We hereby confirm that Lepa Sanna has never attended or received treatment from the Central Coast Local Health District Mental Health Services,” the NSW Health Department later confirmed.
The person who “witnessed” Sanna’s signature on the false affidavit about her “terrible illness” has provided a statutory declaration saying he did not witness her signature and that his own signature was forged.
“My efforts to bring attention to the frauds perpetrated by Dimitriou have been dismissed at every turn,” said Sanna.
Sue Arnott said her life had been divided into “before and after eviction day”, recounting the Sunday morning in October 2013 when removalists arrived at her Brisbane house.
A bailiff handed her court orders, and her house was then filled with at least a dozen men packing and removing everything she owned.
“I couldn’t speak because my voice would break to cry … eventually the bailiff said I’d better pack a suitcase and find somewhere to go,” she said.
Arnott, a divorced mother of two teenage children, was earning under $20,000 per year. She had offered her house as security for a loan her brother was seeking.
In 2011, Dimitriou forged her signature and prepared false tax returns claiming she earned $222,085 per year to obtain a million-dollar loan from ANZ.
Arnott was also used as a director on several companies controlled by Dimitriou which obtained other business loans. Those companies were also used to sting other Dimitriou clients.
In 2013, as the ANZ was pressuring her on her loan defaults, Arnott went into the bank’s Crows Nest branch to ask for a list of all her accounts.
“I was printed out a slip by the teller and I nearly died … I was like, ‘these are mine?’” Arnott later told a judge about the loans in various company names linked to her.
The fallout from her dealings with Dimitriou has been a “gut-wrenching nightmare that’s never ended”.
“He’s a con artist and he’s good at it,” said another victim, Helen Zaurrini, who was trying not to cry as she recounted the stress of her family’s financial ruin after Dimitriou defrauded them of $2.6 million.
Physiotherapist Kathy Leishman said it was “soul-destroying” to have her Newcastle home repossessed after having been introduced to Dimitriou by a local solicitor in 2014, when her husband Mark’s business was experiencing cash-flow difficulties.
“We used to be upstanding members of the community, and we were respected, and all of a sudden we’ve been kicked out of our house … There are no words really,” Kathy Leishman said.
Mark Leishman said when the cost of litigation and loss of the family home was added, the financial loss caused by Dimitriou was “well over $4 million”.
In 2016, a Supreme Court judge found that “Dimitriou or someone at his direction manipulated the signatures on … mortgage documents to make it appear that [Kathy Leishman] and Mark Leishman signed them when they had not.”
Although Dimitriou’s fraudulent behaviour had been raised in numerous court cases, it wasn’t until 2023 that he was finally jailed. But it wasn’t for stealing millions of dollars from his clients.
Instead, Dimitriou is serving his non-parole period of two years and three months in a minimum security jail in Emu Plains for defrauding the ANZ bank of almost $2 million relating to Sue Arnott’s loans.
Adding to the frustration and anger of the fraudster’s numerous victims, whose life savings Dimitriou plundered, is that they allege he was assisted in his web of deceit by ANZ Chatswood’s then-loans manager, David Wayne Winiata, 45.
At Dimitriou’s trial, Winiata confessed that as loans manager, he’d forged Arnott’s signature on a loan application dated February 10, 2012. Judge Pauline David found that Winiata had also forged Arnott’s signature on a loan document in January 2012.
Winiata said that Dimitriou was the source of many client referrals and that they spoke “three or four times a day about all different types of … customers that we’ve got things going with”.
The court also heard that Winiata’s then-wife, Terri Dawson, was also “implicated in aspects of the deception”. She was encouraged by her husband and Dimitriou to become a mortgage broker and, at one stage, listed her business address as Dimitriou’s office.
The February loan document, on which Winiata forged Arnott’s signature, also falsely refers to an interview occurring between his wife and Arnott.
Arnott was able to prove she was in Brisbane – not Sydney – at the time Dawson claimed to have interviewed her.
Dawson later admitted in court that she had never met Arnott or spoken to her.
In her September 2023 judgment, the judge said, “I accept that both Mr Winiata and Ms Dawson were, to some extent, possibly involved in the alleged crime. However, I do not find that the forgeries and any associated lies told by Mr Winiata about them have the effect of extricating the accused [Dimitriou] in relation to the documents in question here.”
Dawson, 47, was convicted in 2019 of dishonestly obtaining a financial advantage by deception in relation to the matter. She was sentenced to a two-year community correction order.
In a 2014 appeal court matter relating to another Dimitriou loan, evidence was given about an email exchange between Dimitriou and Winiata on December 31, 2011, in which Dimitriou refers to “3%” of the “total lend amount” being split between Winiata and himself.
Later in the same judgment, it was noted by the judge, “I am satisfied … that there is at least an arguable case that the Bank, through Mr Waniata (sic) was aware of circumstances that would cause an honest and reasonable person to make further enquiries … and that the Bank, through Mr Waniata wilfully and recklessly failed to make such enquiries.”
Despite being stood down without pay during a 2012 investigation, it is understood Winiata was never sacked by ANZ. He left in 2015 and, for the next two years, worked as a relationship manager for the Commonwealth Bank. Winiata is currently a manager with Cricket NSW.
Comment was sought from Winiata.
In response to questions about what action the bank had taken over Winiata, an ANZ spokesperson said: “We take appropriate action, including dismissal and referring to police for criminal investigation.”
Pressed whether the bank did any of these things in relation to Winiata, the spokesperson replied: “We won’t comment on individual employees, I am afraid.”
The statement also said that at the time, “ANZ worked with a number of customers to resolve individual matters”.
The Herald has obtained other written complaints to the ANZ about Winiata and Dimitriou.
In August 2011, John and Joan Miller – not their real names – were shocked to find $1500 had been withdrawn from their account for a property valuation. “We have not authorised a valuation and we believe the $1500 has been withdrawn from our account fraudulently,” they complained to the bank.
John Miller told the Herald neighbours had suggested he talk to Dimitriou about a loan. Feeling uneasy about Dimitriou’s pitch, John Miller declined to go ahead with a loan application.
The Millers were therefore shocked about the unauthorised payment of $1500 for a property valuation to be used for a proposed loan. When they complained, they were told that “David [Winiata] was our business manager and he did the voucher for $1500”. John Miller insisted that his signature had been forged and that he had not made a loan application or provided authorisation to conduct a valuation on his home.
But the ANZ fobbed them off. The bank’s area manager sent an email on August 23, 2011, saying that John Miller had met Winiata and Dimitriou at the latter’s Bella Vista office on February 2. “Both David and George can testify that it was [Mr Miller] who attended the meeting and signed the relevant documents,” the email said.
The Millers continued to protest. Joan Miller said she drove the bank to “distraction” until they got their money back.
Mr M, a Melbourne businessman who asked not to be named, was introduced to Dimitriou in 2011 after one of his associates recommended Dimitriou, saying he was an “absolute genius” at getting loans.
Using two unencumbered residential properties in the Melbourne suburb of Bentleigh, which were valued at around $3 million, Dimitriou used Winiata at the ANZ bank in Chatswood to organise a series of loans totalling $2.35 million.
Mr M was notified that the loans had been approved.
However, after he did not hear from the bank about when the borrowed funds would arrive in the family company’s account, Mr M started to worry.
Dimitriou told him they were “busy with lots of clients” and that “as soon as he knew he would let me know”.
“Months go by – nothing,” Mr M told the Herald.
Mr M said in an affidavit tendered in court that at one stage he almost got into a fist fight at a family event over the missing money.
Finally, Mr M went to his local ANZ bank in Melbourne. He was informed that the loan funds had gone into the company’s account and then straight out again into accounts associated with Dimitriou.
Mr M chased Dimitriou for the return of his money. In 2015, he went to the police and was put onto a detective from the NSW Fraud Squad who, after hearing Mr M’s story, said: “You too?” and said there were plenty of others.
Mr M said he did three reports for the police and nothing ever happened. He said the ANZ branch claimed they couldn’t find the paperwork to see who had approved the transfer of his money to Dimitriou.
One of the properties was forfeited as Mr M and his family couldn’t keep up the interest payments on the loan that Dimitriou had obtained.
Dimitriou’s luck finally ran out in 2019 when he declared bankruptcy. There had been two previous attempts to bankrupt him and Revenue NSW had been chasing his companies over 276 unpaid traffic fines totalling $301,213.
Another of his companies was later wound up owing $1.6 million to the Australian Tax Office.
Sue Arnott and her company successfully sued Dimitriou for almost $2 million. Rather than pay, Dimitriou declared himself bankrupt, claiming he had only $3 to his name.
“The Bankrupt has disclosed that he is currently employed as a clerk and earns an annual income of $38,400 per annum,” his initial trustee reported to his creditors in late 2019.
His Lamborghini and Maserati had vanished, as had the millions of dollars he’d stolen from clients.
Bankruptcies are discharged after three years, but in Dimitriou’s case, his bankruptcy has been extended until 2027 for various reasons, including that he “intentionally provided false or misleading Information” to his trustee and that he failed to disclose his interest in certain assets.
When the Herald checked the residential address Dimitriou listed on his bankruptcy documents, it turned out to be a hotel garage in Zetland.
Days before declaring he was insolvent, the fraudster is alleged to have used Sydney solicitor Hector Ekes, who’d previously been suspended for misconduct for five years, to help him backdate documents to transfer his assets to an associate, who is also a former bankrupt.
Before joining forces with Dimitriou, Ekes had acted for several of Dimitrou’s clients who were suing Dimitriou. One by one, they filed professional negligence actions against him.
In 2020, Ekes handed in his practising certificate and the NSW Law Society took control of Ekes’ law firm due to numerous complaints by clients, including for misconduct, negligence and possibly fraud.
Ekes, 49 was last seen alive on September 17, last year. His body was discovered two days later in premises above a pawn shop on William Street, Darlinghurst. According to the Coroner’s office, the cause of death was “chronic alcohol abuse”.
At the time of Ekes’ death, he was serving a 20-month sentence by way of a community corrections order for repeated drink-driving offences and driving while suspended.
For years, Ekes’ former clients Mark and Kathy Leishman have been trying to make a claim against Ekes under LawCover’s fidelity fund. But they have been continually frustrated by the Law Society’s failure to release their files, which the society had taken from Ekes’s office. The Newcastle couple recently received an email from the Law Society saying, “You are able to inspect the boxes of files at Grace Storage at Campbelltown. There is a cost of facilitating such inspection of $597.60. If the boxes were transported to the Law Society in Phillip Street, there is a cost of $861.80.”
In a statement to the Herald, the Law Society said, “We are presently liaising with former clients that have contacted the Law Society regarding retrieval and inspection of documents” and that the Law Society “acts to protect clients of legal practices, by taking appropriate action under the Legal Profession Uniform Law and Rules”.
“We were the roadkill in all this,” said Mark Leishman. “The police have let us down, the Law Society has let us down.”