A man who pretended to rob a luxury jewellery store and tied up a terrified employee as part of an alleged $2.8 million insurance fraud plot has been jailed for his reckless crime.
Shanel Tofaeono, 39, was part of a wider scheme allegedly headed up by jeweller Michel Germani to stage a robbery of his Hilton Hotel store in Sydney's CBD in January 2022.
The 39-year-old is the only one of six arrested to have pleaded guilty and was sentenced on Wednesday to a maximum four years and seven months in prison.
Judge John Pickering said Tofaeono had met his co-conspirators hours before heading to the Sydney store to commit the staged robbery with another accused Mounir Helou.
Germani was tied up to make the fake burglary more convincing, while the female employee had her neck grabbed and was told to unload jewellery from the store's safe into bags before being bound with cable ties, the judge said.
“Some of the jewellery fell onto the floor as her hands were shaking so much due to fear,” he said.
"For her, for all intents and purposes, she was then involved in what was a very real robbery to her, one that must have been terrifying.”
Tofaeono was reckless as to the woman's suffering at the time, the judge ruled.
Helou, Germani, Germani's wife Coco, Andrea David Cusumano, and Giulia Penna have each pleaded not guilty to various charges brought over the alleged incident and will face a joint trial in May 2025.
On Wednesday, Judge Pickering discounted Tofaeono's sentence due to his early guilty pleas to one count of detaining a person in company to commit a serious indictable offence and one count of attempting to dishonestly obtain a financial advantage by deception.
According to agreed facts filed in the case, Michel Germani created the fraud plot because his store was not doing well financially.
Tofaeono was not linked with the jeweller's business, did not play a role in planning the fraud, and gained a financial benefit that was nowhere near the $2.8 million sought from the insurer, Judge Pickering said.
However, the 39-year-old was fundamental to the plot because it was his job to make the robbery look real enough to fool the police and insurer, the judge noted.
The staged robbery itself took 11 minutes before Tofaeono and Helou left, exchanging bags full of jewels and parting ways, the agreed facts say.
Police managed to track the pair due to their "amateur" naivety about the extent of CCTV coverage in the Sydney CBD with others involved in the plot becoming ensnared in the investigation.
Judge Pickering expressed some doubts as to some of the 39-year-old's claims of a dysfunctional upbringing and expressed scepticism that his drug and alcohol abuse disorder was linked to the staged robbery.
Rather it was his connection to antisocial peers and a desire for financial reward that motivated him to take part in the plot, the judge said.
Tofaeono will be eligible for release on September 12, 2025 at the end of his two-year-and-five-month non-parole period.
His head sentence will expire on November 12, 2027.
