Alvaro Gonzalez charged Dual Australia $1000 an hour to write emails sent in his wife’s name from her Dual email account, the County Court of Victoria heard today.

Gonzalez, 50, and his wife Josie, 45, have each been charged with 14 counts of fraud amounting to $17.4 million. They have pleaded not guilty.

Josie Gonzalez testified that in her role as national claims manager at Dual she regularly hired Jaag Lawyers — the law firm she had set up with her husband — and asked him to read and condense reports put together by other legal firms, which also charged Dual.

He would “format“ this legal advice in a style his wife felt she could forward to senior colleagues.

“I would have advised Alvaro to peruse all the advices and ascertain from them what I needed to know,” Josie Gonzalez told the court. “He typed in the body of the email. I made sure it was formatted correctly and then used it.”

Dual was the only client of Jaag Lawyers, an acronym of Josie and Alvaro Gonzalez. The firm was incorporated in November 2010, at around the same time as Josie began working at Dual. She was paid $145,000 a year plus bonus and permitted to work from her home office in inner-suburban North Carlton, and later in Kew’s Studley Park after Alvaro bought a $4.4 million house in 2012.

Alvaro worked in the same home offices as his wife and much of the advice Dual paid him for was verbal, she said.

Josie allocated Jaag 90% of the legal work done on Dual’s top 30 claims. She also instructed accounts payable to refer to Jaag Lawyers simply as “counsel“ for all purposes. All other law firms were formally named in invoices and files.

As cross-examination got underway just before lunchtime, prosecutor Andrew Grant asked Josie Gonzalez if she agreed all the documents she produced in her role at Dual were designed to conceal Jaag’s identity. For example, the names Josie Gonzalez and Alvaro Gonzalez were not printed on any invoices.

She denied any concealment.

“When I started at Dual my workload was enormous,” she said. “This was effectively an 18 to 20 hours a day job. I had to do everything myself and I worked through the day, through the weekend, through the night.

“I was required to provide detailed reports to [Dual’s underwriter] Arch of large losses that I simply did not have capacity to do on my own.”

Alvaro would complete timesheets and his wife would then create Jaag’s invoices billing Dual. The invoices would then be scanned and emailed by Josie using her Dual Australia email account. Dual then paid the amount into the Jaag Lawyers bank account.

Josie agreed reports she was required to submit to Arch in London in her role as national claims manager were done by Alvaro.

“I simply did not have time to go through all the voluminous material provided to me on a daily basis,“ she said. “I simply did not have time to do everything because I had so many other things I needed to perform."

Gonzalez denied she could have asked Dual MD Damien Coates for additional staff rather than pay Alvaro $1000 an hour.

“There was not the budget for that,” she said.

Jaag only kept hardcopy timesheets at the couple’s home office in North Carlton, with no electronic version available.

“I used these timesheets to calculate how much time had been spent on the file to put in the tax invoice to Dual,“ she said.

Gonzalez was asked what her frame of mind was when she signed an agreement to return the disputed money to Dual in May 2014.

“I felt absolutely defeated, like I had no opportunity to fight this onslaught. I was over a barrel,” she said.

The ATO also returned to Dual all the tax payments it had received from Jaag.