Shivanie Gobin, 18, was yesterday fined $25,000 after pleading guilty to stealing cosmetics from the Fazia’s Collection Store in Georgetown.
If Gobin, an accounts clerk, fails to pay the fine, she will have to serve a two-month prison sentence.
Gobin accepted that on August 16, at Georgetown, she stole a bottle of shampoo, conditioner, deodorant and two lipsticks, all totalling $4,180, from the store.
The young woman explained that she had not yet left the store with the items when she was approached by the security guard. She said that she had taken the items off the shelf and had placed them into her bag while she walked around the store to continue to shop. She insisted that she was going to pay for the items. “Ah didn’t leave the store yet,” the girl said in a soft tone.
Magistrate Fabayo Azore, before whom the case was called at the Georgetown Magistrates’ Courts, however, cautioned the teen that it was her act of placing the items into her bag before leaving the store that caused the security guard’s suspicion that she had stolen them. This act, the court explained, would have tainted any genuine intent which Gobin may have had to pay for the products.
It was in this circumstance that Magistrate Azore said that she would record the defendant’s guilty plea though her attorney Paul Fung-a-Fat said that his client had intended to pay for the things. “We do not take things off the shelf in the store and place them into our bags before paying and exiting the store,” the magistrate firmly told the young woman.
In mitigation, Fung-a-Fat begged for a non-custodial sentence. He said Gobin has a stable job as an accounts clerk, and has a fixed address at 138 Non Pareil, East Coast Demerara.
He asked the court to consider that his client was young, had no antecedents and had spent two days in the lockup before being arraigned. This, he said, had taught her a lesson and the seriousness of what she had done.
Gobin was later fined.
