PR operative Margot McKay has been sentenced to 15 months' periodic detention, reports Kate McClymont in The Sydney Morning Herald. The news actually broke yesterday but I missed it. I mentioned the case in a post yesterday.

Sentencing was originally slated for 16 March, as I noted in a comment to an earlier post.

On three occasions in 2004, Margot Olive McKay, 56, got family and friends to buy $150,000 worth of shares on the eve of media announcements that she had written.

The sentence is significantly different from that which Steve Vizard attracted for similar crimes. According to the Wikipedia, Vizard was "fined a total of $390,000 and disqualified from being a company director for 10 years". The Vizard case was extremely high-profile. He had been a successful comedian before becoming a director of Australia's largest telecommunications company, Telstra.

In sentencing [McKay], Justice Tony Whealy of the Supreme Court said the offences were deliberate and committed by a "true insider".

According to the Law Reform Commission:

In New South Wales, where an offender is sentenced to a term of imprisonment which exceeds three months but is less than three years, the sentencing court may order that sentence to be served by way of periodic detention, which generally requires the offender to remain in custody for two consecutive days of each week for the duration of the sentence.