The two children of a convicted Indian Muslim NDIS fraudster have lost a court bid to keep two of her million-dollar western Sydney homes.
Rehana Memon, who worked as an occupational therapist while ripping off the National Insurance Disability Scheme, was jailed for six years in May 2024 after pleading guilty to 22 counts of obtaining financial advantage by deception.
She received $8 million from the NDIS for her services, but half a million of that was fraudulent, and a court heard she colluded with participants and their representatives to misrepresent the value of the services she provided by falsifying reports and overcharging.
Memon owned five homes across Sydney, including one in Auburn worth more than $1 million, and one in South Granville worth about the same, and restraining orders were placed on the properties after her arrest in September 2020.
Her children Rabiya and Sufian Mohamed had been living in one of the homes and were given a notice to vacate in December last year. They then launched a legal bid arguing they had interest in the homes, which they believed had been promised to them by their mother after their parents divorced.
But acting Acting Justice Monika Schmidt found in the NSW Supreme Court on Wednesday that all five homes must be forfeited to the Commonwealth.
There is no suggestion of wrongdoing by Ms Memon’s children.
The ruling came in the same week that Indian NDIS provider Amit Sharma was spared jail for illegally obtaining the names of almost 20,000 NDIS participants as part of a criminal enterprise with friend and National Disability Insurance Agency worker Leena Kumar, who also avoided jail.
The scandal-plagued NDIS has blown out to cost $48 billion a year with 740,000 participants, and is losing billions annually to fraud, with investigators admitting earlier this year they had no idea how much was being stolen.
A Nine newspapers investigation in 2022 found that Middle Eastern gangs were heavily involved in NDIS fraud, and that same year the boss of the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission said as much as one-fifth of NDIS funding was being abused by crime syndicates.
The NDIS is set to cost taxpayers more than the aged pension within just over two years if current trends continue and the large-scale fraud is not reined in, with the current growth trajectory of 10% per year on track to push the scheme over $100 billion by 2027, making it the largest area of government spending.
Earlier this month Disability and NDIS Minister Mark Butler announced reforms aimed at bringing growth down to 5 or 6% a year, including a new program to divert children with mild autism away from the scheme.
According to the latest quarterly report, about 11% of children aged between five and seven were on the NDIS at the end of June, including 6.4% of girls and 13.7% of boys.
Header image: Rehana Memon being taken into custody (AFP).
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