Illustration: Joe Benke. All that remains to be done in the saga of the collapse of Australian Motor Finance is a last plea hearing, expected in July, and then sentencing for Ian Brindley, a one-time executive in Robert Holmes a Court's Heytesbury Group. Earlier this month, Brindley pleaded guilty to 14 counts of obtaining a financial advantage by deception. His partners in crime, Michael O'Brien, Denis Angeleri and Guiseppe "Joe" Porcaro, have already been sentenced to nine years, 13 years and 8½ years, respectively. Theirs is a story about how easily crime can creep into a workplace, how difficult it can be to sustain, and how small, random events can cause the whole thing to come a cropper. The Sunday Age has decided not to publish Stephanie's real name because, despite various attempts, we have been unable to contact her. There is no suggestion she took part in any wrongdoing.

If Stephanie had arrived at work that day, it's likely she would have spent some time processing loans that had fallen behind on their payments. She was covering for a colleague who was away. She knew the routine, but it wasn't a job she would regularly have done. She would have passed these to Brindley who would have come back with some amendments before final lodgement with Bendigo and Adelaide Bank. The company had been granted $100 million from the bank to provide "non-conforming" loans, catering to customers who couldn't get money from mainstream lenders. The amendments were crucial. Brindley needed to make the changes to avoid the risk the bank would get wind of how bad things were at AMF. The company had apparently begun well. It occupied a niche in the Australian market that was ripe for plucking before the global financial crisis. It had attracted funding from National Australia Bank and from private investors. Many of these were friends and family lured into the business by Porcaro.

But as early as 2003, it was struggling to make ends meet. "You were self-insuring, the lending practices were reckless, you were being pursued by the banks and you should have simply closed the business down," County Court chief judge Michael Rozenes said in sentencing O'Brien. Instead, Angeleri developed a plan to create fake loans to get enough money to cover the problems. In some cases, money flowed in a mad loop: borrowed from the bank on the back of a fake loan and then paid back to the bank to meet the payments on an old loan. In the end, AMF had written more than $24 million of fake loans. "The plan was elaborate, sophisticated and well planned and no stone was left unturned to avoid detection either by the banks themselves or by auditors," said County Court judge Paul Lacava In sentencing Angeleri. "This way, the offending proceeded unabated and undetected for nearly seven years." That morning, Stephanie didn't make it to work. As a result, the job of prepping the paperwork was given to someone more junior.

He didn't follow the normal drill. Instead of passing the loan documents to someone ready to doctor them, he sent them straight to the bank. And alarm bells started ringing. Angeleri was the mastermind of the scheme. He is otherwise famous for being the husband of the woman credited with putting Liz Hurley off her flirtation with Shane Warne. Angeleri's wife, Adele, received a string of racy text messages from the cricketing legend in 2010. The texts came as Warne's relationship with supermodel Hurley was front-page news. Denis Angeleri responded to Warne's advances with a twitter campaign that included the memorable tweet "The only thing Shane Warne is interested in is his dick." Hurley later referred to the episode as "Jerry Springer-esque".

The story ran in London's News of the World the day before Angeleri was ordered to pay $4.8 million in damages for his role in the AMF fraud. O'Brien's story, disclosed in detail in the sentencing comments by County Court chief judge Michael Rozenes, is truly sad. Despite what Rozenes refers to as "an impressive work history", it details a life punctuated by personal trauma and professional failure. At the age of eight, he saw a woman decapitated in an auto accident. He was abused at his Catholic high school and did not finish year 12. At 30, a dear friend was murdered. It goes on. In the mid-1980s, he had been sued and filed for bankruptcy. Two businesses he had built had failed. His lawyer, Kristina Kothrakis, told the court that when Angeleri pitched the idea of faking loans O'Brien was shocked, but offered no resistance. He pleaded guilty at the first opportunity.

"She said you had two failed business ventures behind you," Justice Rozenes recounted. "She said that you thought that you just needed some time, some breathing space, and the business would recover." It wasn't to be. The carousel had begun in 2003 and it ran until a locksmith hired by bank-appointed investigators broke into AMF's Port Melbourne offices in 2009. There they found … very little. Cables were strewn across the floor. All records of the business – including a server that would have contained the entire digital trail – had vanished without a trace. But the clean-up had been rushed. It had left behind two vital pieces: an invoice to IT company Netsol and a laptop computer.

The computer contained CCTV footage of the culprits leaving and entering the office building multiple times, ostensibly removing the evidence of their crimes. The invoice led investigators to Pakistan, where a software engineer had been provided just two months earlier with a back-up of AMF's databases. It was a final, almost comical insult to the criminal planning of the directors. In December 2008, just weeks before the fraud was discovered, ratings agency Standard & Poor's published a rating on AMF. This meant that one of the world's top corporate entities had approved the company's processes and procedures.