A Brisbane financial planner who smashed his best client’s head in with a hammer is expected to learn his sentence on Wednesday.

October 24, 2018

A Queensland financial planner is expected to find out his fate after he bashed his top client to death with a hammer and hid his body in a Brisbane storage facility.

Trung The Ma, 35, murdered Huegio Bonham at the 63-year-old’s Gold Coast home in February 2014 after he was unable to convince his client to leave his investments with Ma’s firm, Brisbane Money Management.

His trial was told the former Commonwealth Bank employee stole $706,000 from Mr Bonham over a four-year period as his firm struggled with bad debts.

Ma’s motive for murder was to hid that theft, crown prosecutor Michael Lehane told the jury.

Ma admitted killing Mr Bonham, but argued that due to his poor mental health it was manslaughter due to his diminished responsibility.

The trial heard Ma methodically cleaned the crime scene after he killed Mr Bonham with three blows to his head with the hammer he found on a shelf.

Later CCTV at Bunning’s filmed Ma purchasing a large plastic container, which he loaded Mr Bonham’s body into before hiding it and picking up his wife from work.

During the trial Ma’s defence lawyer, Tim Ryan, attempted to show another side to Ma, as a vulnerable refugee who’d fled communist Vietnam with his family as a child.

He said Ma had been weighed down for years with anxiety and stress due to expectations heaped upon him by his father to look after and provide for their extended family.

A Brisbane Supreme Court jury on Friday found him guilty of murder.

He’ll be sentenced in the same court on Wednesday.