Under their unwritten employment agreement, Mr Ange offered to pay Ms Lozzi’s rent and top up her salary in cash. He also told her to use the company’s finances to cover her expenses, she said.

“Con asked if I could offset my cash salary against expenses that could be claimed by the company,” Ms Lozzi said.

“At the time, my own expenses were a trip I was planning, booked through Flight Centre —”

At this point Magistrate Brett Shields interrupted: “Can I just suggest that that ... answer amounts to an admission of complicity in a fraud being perpetuated against the Commonwealth?”

The prosecutor and the police officer in charge of the investigation exchanged a look.

But after a brief adjournment, Ms Lozzi and her defence counsel Frank Coyne pressed on.

Ms Lozzi fleshed out the details of cash payments including $418 for a sign to be displayed at her wedding, $2500 to pay for airfares, a $200 phone bill and $951 energy bill. Mr Ange also agreed to recompense her personal credit card when she used it for business, such as a $2600 bill for Fast Eddy’s Rubbish Removals after he closed the adult store in Crows Nest, she said.

“The invoices being paid were offset or salary sacrificed what I would have been paid in cash,” Ms Lozzi said.

Ms Lozzi, who the prosecution described as more of a bookkeeper than a financial controller, detailed a tumultuous period in Mr Ange’s employment, during which the Crows Nest office where she worked was firebombed in 2016. She said Mr Ange oscillated between blaming ex-brothel owner Eddie Hayson and the son of another associate, Michael Kontos.

Mr Ange was later diagnosed with motor neurone disease, though Ms Lozzi felt more diagnostic interventions could have been performed. “His wife said he didn’t want to remove his hairpiece for the MRI,” she said.

In 2018, after she split up from her husband, Ms Lozzi said she asked Mr Ange if she could be “put on the books” to provide proof of income to buy a house.

“I said, ‘Now that my divorce is complete there’s no reason for me not to have complete transparency’. Con said he could not afford to put me on the books for the amount he was paying me. It would throw out his obligations for employee benefits.”

Ultimately he agreed to pay her a salary that would satisfy her bank manager in exchange for cash that she delivered to the office in a coloured envelope each month.

But in late 2019, following a contretemps between Mr Ange and some law enforcement agents at Brisbane Airport, things changed again.

“I said, ‘In light of your phone being confiscated and other things, I don’t think it’s wise that my rent gets paid’. We had a discussion about it,” Ms Lozzi said.

Mr Ange wanted to continue to pay her cash. Eventually they decided to pay her into an account she set up in one of her children’s names.

But her employment ended in February 2020 when she confronted him about his behaviour after he returned from a trip to the Philippines. He reacted angrily, threatening Ms Lozzi and her family, she said, and accused her of pocketing the tax and superannuation components of her on-the-books salary in contravention of what they had agreed.

He later allegedly threatened to kill her and hurt her children. “Con said to me, ‘Victor will find it hard to play sport with a broken nose, won’t he’,” Ms Lozzi said. “He called him Victor, but his name was Vincent.”

Her husband and brother implored Ms Lozzi not to give Mr Ange any money, but she said she convinced her mother to lend her the money and do it anyway.

Ms Lozzi admitted under cross-examination to filing a false tax return. She has pleaded not guilty to 27 counts of obtaining a financial advantage by deception.

The trial continues.