The daughter of a fugitive property developer has avoided jail after a Sydney judge said she was “not some sort of proxy for her father”.
Ashlyn Nassif, the daughter of Jean Nassif, pleaded guilty in June to providing false or misleading information to obtain the loan from Westpac, which was used to construct three apartment towers in Sydney’s north-west in 2021.
The 32-year-old has accepted her role but her lawyer, Murugan Thangaraj SC, on Monday argued her “notorious” father also played a part.
The court heard she had succumbed to pressure from her father when she falsified documents for a $150m construction loan.
The NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption (Icac) is currently investigating allegations that NSW Liberal powerbrokers took a $2m payment from Jean Nassif in breach of the NSW Electoral Funding Act.
Nassif, now 58, had offered to appear at Icac on Friday via video link but produced a medical certificate to excuse himself. He fled Australia for rural Lebanon in 2022 and has previously denied wrongdoing.
On Monday, judge Christopher Halburd sentenced Ashlyn to a six-month community corrections order without supervision, saying “this defendant is not some sort of proxy for her father”.
“The defendant before the court is not Jean Nassif, she has not been charged and sentenced today in relation to the vast array of things apparently her father has done, and that needs to be borne in mind.”
Halburd accepted the argument of Ashlyn’s lawyer that “if she hadn’t been under the sway of her father she never would have committed an offence at all”.
Halburd said Ashlyn Nassif had a major depressive disorder that was present at the time of the offending.
The 32-year-old, who was in court with a number of supporters, sobbed when her sentence was handed down.
Thangaraj told Burwood local court on Monday that Jeran’s ex-wife had described experiencing a decade of coercive control and outlined how this was consistent with the way he treated his daughter.
Jean Nassif would tell his daughter to lose weight, get weight-reducing surgery or cosmetic surgery so “she could look better and he could show her off”, the lawyer told the court.
She was “hardly the glamorous heiress as portrayed,” Thangaraj said.
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Her father – who was the head of failed construction firm Toplace – is being pursued by NSW police after a two-year fraud investigation.
A warrant has been issued for his arrest and 57 companies linked with Toplace are in administration.
“How any person could leave their child to face charges like this for his company’s benefit – to make her fend for herself, to sell per property for her legal fees … what does that say about who he is,” Thangaraj told the court.
Before his departure, Jean Nassif told his daughter he was “desperate” for the Westpac loan, her lawyer said in court.
“If she wasn’t working for him or if he wasn’t her father, she would never have committed this offence.”
The prosecution argued Ashlyn Nassif knew the purchasers and contractors at Toplace did not meet the definition of an “at arm’s length” transaction. The defence had disputed that.
