Accountant who lived the high life on company cash

An accountant who plundered £140,000 from an engineering company to fund a lavish lifestyle of foreign holidays and champagne lunches has been jailed for 30 months.

Alison Thomas, 52, also used the cash she stole to pay for her child’s private education.

Thomas had worked as an accountant at the small family-owned firm for seven years and had access to their accounts.

She abused her position as a trusted member of the team to transfer payments totalling £144,589 over to her personal account between December 2011 and January 2018.

The fraud only came to light when her boss investigated why the company was not performing as well as it should have been, Croydon Crown Court heard.

He raised suspicions about Thomas’s lifestyle of champagne lunches, foreign holidays and private education for her child on the wages she was paid.

Thomas’s employer then probed the company accounts and uncovered the illicit payments being made to her personal account before confronting her.

The thieving accountant immediately confessed to the scam and she was arrested.

Thomas, of Tadworth Street, Tadworth, Surrey, admitted fraud by abuse of position and was jailed for 30 months.

PC Stewart Bold of the Met’s Economic Crime Hub in Lewisham, said: ‘Thomas used her position of trust to withdraw large funds from the company to fund her own lifestyle. She lived beyond her means and treated the company’s account as her own.

‘In doing so she put the company in serious financial difficulty. Fortunately this did not lead to the loss of any jobs and therefore further financial struggles for its employees and their families.

‘The sentence she has received demonstrates the severity of her actions and I hope will act as a deterrent to others.’
ends