Robin Greenburg

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Robin Greenburg

Conviction(s)	Arson, Embezzelment
Penalty	17 years imprisonment

Robin Greenburg was an Australian businesswoman whose Western Women group in Western Australia was to have been an innovative financier helping women in business. But it lost most of the money subscribed and in 1992 Greenburg pled guilty to embezzlement and arson and was sentenced to 17 years jail.

Greenburg's career in business had not been entirely successful before her Western Women idea. She was bankrupted in 1972 when a pet products business failed in Sydney, and then again in 1983 in South Australia through what she called "sexually transmitted debt" — got from her husband of the time.

In 1990 her Western Women had acquired the shares of the First Mortgage Permanent Building Society in Victoria with the idea of renaming it the First Women's Permanent Building Society and lending to ethical industries and businesses majority owned by women. On that basis she attracted (in the end) a quite substantial total of some $9.4 million in deposits.

But by late 1990 some women who had deposited money apparently had trouble getting it back. Based on complaints the Australian Securities Commission (ASC) in February 1991 went to the Western Australian Supreme Court asking that firstly she not accept money except through a registered prospectus and secondly that a receiver be appointed to ascertain the assets of the business.

Greenburg accused the ASC of being sexist, or of attacking her for not being part of the business establishment, but she did in fact prepare a prospectus setting out fine feminist principles (but remarkably little investor control). However the end was nigh. Documents from Western Women started turning up in strange places. A rubbish bag full, weighted down with a stone, washed up on the shores of the Swan River, and a bushfire near Gingin was traced to a partly-burnt kerosene-soaked bin full of Western Women documents.

The court agreed in March 1991 to appoint a receiver (who as it happened was a woman), who soon found the group was insolvent. Of $9.4m raised in deposits about $6m had been lost and of that some $3m was either stolen by Greenburg or spent on high living for herself. At first she fled but a few months later gave herself up and pled guilty to theft and arson charges. It was actually the arson from the bushfire rather than the misappropriations which attracted the longest part of her sentence, some 14 years out of the 17 years total.

Depositors got only some of their money back, with the Western Australian government, the National Australia Bank and the R & I Bank putting together about $3.8m in compensation. Greenburg herself was bankrupted for a third time, and was only discharged from that in 2003.^[1]