By AIDAN KNIGHT
A SMALL Moe business has been left short changed after a former employee got off lightly on charges of theft under their boss’s nose.
Peri Hortis has operated Saviges Road Fast & Ezy service station for close to three decades, and became the owner seven years ago.
Mr Hortis began to notice discrepancies over a period of 12 months, dating back to August 2022, when consulting with the accountant of his business, and decided to investigate CCTV footage against recorded transactions.
He describes a feeling of “sick to my stomach” when what he discovered was footage of his trusted employee pocketing $500 in cash directly from the till.
The offender was one Ms Nicky Styles, who had been an employee for two-and-a-half years.
In his victim impact statement to the court, Mr Hortis described Styles as “someone I trusted almost as much as family, stealing directly from me and placing the cash in her pocket. I had given Ms Styles free fuel on top of her wages and gifted her exceptional presents at Christmas time”, and even supplied her with a mobile phone at one point in time.
He alleges an immediate admission when confronted about the footage, but no remorse from Ms Styles, which led him to dig further, and uncovered business records exceeding $43,000 of financial loss.
These acts of theft started off in smaller portions, first at $100 weekly, always from the till.
Mr Hortis’ financials clearly display the repeated instances multiplying until she reached $500 (several times per week), and then branched out to fuel cards, totalling to $1500 of the stolen amount. She stole from her boss more than 100 times.
Mr Hortis also alleges that upon admitting she stole from him, Styles claimed the money was for her daughter’s braces, which she could not afford, and she would pay him back. It was at this point that he took back her keys and fired her from the store.
“Her own family member returned some of the stolen cards because even she knew Ms Styles could not have possibly afforded them,” Mr Hortis said, detailing his former employee’s charitable theft, after she began gifting the stolen funds as birthday presents.
The theft became more elaborate to avoid detection, as she started to process her taking from the till as non-existent scratchy pay outs, which caught Mr Hortis’ eye on the transaction logs as absurd amounts for one person to win on a scratch-its ticket.
Upon compiling this evidence, Mr Hortis approached Moe police in July 2024 with detailed financial records and even some incriminating CCTV footage. Despite an abundance of evidence, police only proceeded with charges amounting to two weeks’ worth of offending, which Mr Hortis expresses deep disappointment in.
“Knowing the full extent of the offending … and having the evidence to support it, yet being told that only a fraction could be pursued left me deeply shaken … it has damaged my trust in the justice system in a way I never expected,” he told the court. He further describes making formal complaints to Victoria Police and having meetings with higher-ranking officers, but ultimately, the scope of charges did not expand. Mr Hortis was told to purse further legal proceedings independently.
Mr Hortis says he is looking into further renumeration via his legal team, to recover the theft that “the justice system failed to charge Ms Styles with”.
The final court appearance occurred on December 1, 2025, in which Ms Styles pled guilty. She was ordered to repay $1657.39, as well as a $200 fine to the court, and was sentenced to a four-year suspended sentence, which correlates with a good behaviour bond.
In the first hearing, before pleading guilty, Mr Hortis alleges that the perpetrator’s defence lawyer initially argued that she was simply transferring money from the service station to the bottle shop for “bits and pieces”.
“I felt ignored, unsupported, and abandoned by a system I believed was there to protect victims. The lack of action made me feel powerless, and it has damaged my trust in the justice system in a way I never expected.”
Mr Hortis’s victim impact statement described not only financial ruin but also the deep personal toll.
“This hasn’t just harmed my businesses and my family. It has rippled out and hurt the wider Moe community that I have always done everything I can to serve.”
Reflecting on the unfortunate situation, Mr Hortis attributes the case even coming to court to his own persistent complaints and advocacy, rather than support from authorities. He continues to hope that attention to these events might bring some measure of justice -not only for himself, but for all who have been affected.
