Former Continental Coal company secretary Jane Flegg will spend at least two years behind bars after she pleaded guilty in an Australian court for giving false and misleading financial information.

The Supreme Court of Western Australia last week sentenced Flegg to three years and six months imprisonment with a non-parole period of 21 months.

She was sentenced to a further eight months imprisonment for giving false information to the ASX, to start at the expiration of her non-parole period.

The sentence was handed down after Flegg pleaded guilty in January to one count of making available false or misleading information to the ASX, where the now defunct Continental Coal failed to disclose any income-generating asset had gone into administration and another statement that said assets had been sold when they had not.

She also pleaded guilty to one count of stealing about A$2.2-million of applicant funds from a Citation bank account and one count of forging and uttering a bank statement that falsely showed A$575 658 in a Citation bank account when there was only A$117.55 in the account.

In sentencing, the judge remarked in relation to the stealing offences that, while he accepted former Continental Coal director Peter Landau instructed her to commit the offences, Flegg engaged in persistent dishonest, repeated breaches of trust over a nine-month period.

Landau was sentenced in December to five years and two months’ imprisonment with a non-parole period of three years and two months for five stealing offences and one offence of forging and uttering contrary to the WA Criminal Code.

Landau must serve six months of this sentence prior to being released upon him entering into a recognisance in the sum of A$1 000 to be of good behaviour for six months. Overall, the total minimum time Landau must serve is three years and eight months’ imprisonment.

Landau was a director of Citation Resources and Continental Coal.

The now defunct Continental Coal operated in South Africa and was listed on the ASX.