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Over 11 years, Damien Luscombe stole more than $2 million from a range of high-profile clients by forging client emails and financial documents.
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Former White Sky partner sentenced to 6 years of imprisonment
03 April 2024
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Damien Luscombe, former accountant to a range of high-profile entertainment and hospitality clients, will spend a minimum of three years and nine months in jail for stealing more than $2 million from eleven clients.
Luscombe defrauded his clients by altering invoices or creating fake ones and forging emails authorising payments from clients in the forms of loans, bonuses, or royalties.
Over 11 years, Luscombe engaged in 239 fraudulent transactions and created or altered approximately 337 false documents.
Among the defrauded clients were musical acts Gotye, Angus and Julia Stone, and two members of Peking Duk, as well as popular Melbourne restaurateurs.
White Sky, of which Luscombe was a partner, is a business management and financial services firm. It was founded in 2002 and primarily serves clients across music, hospitality, and entertainment.
Before joining the firm, Luscombe had run his accounting practice for six years. He joined White Sky as a junior accounts officer and was promoted to partner and client business manager in 2022.
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His duties included bookkeeping, accounts payable, tour budgeting and accounting, BAS calculations, and internal management.
Luscombe was sentenced to six years of imprisonment, though he will be eligible for release on parole in three years and nine months.
In reaching the sentence, Justice George Georgiou said there was “no doubt” that the offending was “very serious.”
“You engaged in an elaborate and carefully planned fraud upon your employer and your clients,” he said.
“The fact that you were able to engage in this deception for 11 years before you were finally detected speaks of its relative sophistication.”
While his Honour accepted Luscombe was “genuinely remorseful,” he nonetheless considered his moral culpability as “high.”
Some of Luscombe’s clients had been working with him for several years, including one who had been personally managed by him for a decade.
The largest sum stolen from a single client, Peking Duk, was over $625,000 across 37 separate transactions. Most of the money was later spent on gambling.
Luscombe obtained more than $500,000 over 90 separate transactions from the Meatball and Wine Bar and a total of $354,908.39 from Rockin' Roll Circus, an entertainment company that ran St Jerome’s Laneway Festival.
Over a decade earlier, Luscombe had attended court for two charges of obtaining property by deception and one charge of attempting to do so.
Justice Georgiou said the conduct in that case was “similar,” in that Luscombe then, as in this more recent case, fraudulently altered documents and directed payments into his personal bank account.
In both instances, Luscombe made frank admissions as to his wrongdoing and his gambling addiction. That case was adjourned and he was ordered to pay $750 to the court fund.
Luscombe’s misconduct was first identified by another White Sky employee who flagged multiple suspicious transactions to the firm’s founder and managing director, Thomas Harris.
At a meeting with the firm’s lawyers, two days after Harris was first made aware of the suspicious transactions, Luscombe admitted to the wrongdoing.
White Sky told the court Luscombe's misconduct was “as shocking and hurtful a betrayal as we could imagine.”
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