Community service sentences handed out to two shopping centre managers who masterminded a £200,000 property service scam have been condemned as “excessively lenient”.
Juliet Coard and Michael Lawson were employed at the 200-store Galleries shopping centre in Washington, near Sunderland, when they heard a contract to clean and maintain the outside of the complex was up for grabs.
“They used that knowledge for their own benefit and set up a company called Turfcraft,” prosecutor Bridie Smurthwaite told Newcastle Crown Court. “Six weeks after the company was created, Lawson submitted an application to the procurement department, pushing the application through and bypassing the usual checks.”
The court heard the pair listed family members as directors and as the company secretary when Turfcraft was registered at Companies House. Both 49-year-old Coard, of Ireshopeburn and Lawson, 37, of Grange Villa, both County Durham, were employed by Interserve which, said Smurthwaite “would never have awarded the contract if it knew the company was operated by one of its employees”.
Turfcraft was given the contract and initially provided a good service, but when cleaning and maintenance standards dropped suspicions were aroused. An investigation showed that in the the two years from 2008, £206,918 had been paid into the bogus company’s bank account. Both Coard and Lawson, who was an Interserve operations director at The Galleries, were said to have only received about £30,000 each from the scam.
Jane Foley, representing Coard, said her client was short of money after her husband was critically injured in a car crash and was tempted when father-of-six Lawson suggested the fraud. “She was a woman with a good reputation at Interserve and is thoroughly ashamed of what she did,” said Foley.
The court heard that Lawson was remorseful and, his counsel claimed, the fraud had left him unemployed and ruined and that his entire family were devastated by the crime.
After pleading guilty to fraud by abuse of position both were given two years in jail, suspended for two years, by a Judge Deborah Sherwin at Newcastle Crown Court.
The judge told them they would almost certainly have gone to prison had it not been for a “delay in the police investigation, which meant a long wait for justice”. Coard was also ordered to complete 100 hours unpaid work under supervision and Lawson 240 hours.
The suspended prison terms were immediately criticised by one solicitor as “disproportionate” to the size of the fraud. “I have a client who has been warned he faces going to prison for a theft involving one tenth of what this pair embezzled,” said the lawyer, who could not be named because of client confidentiality.
“Here we have people in trusted, senior positions who take hundreds of thousands of pounds and walk away with their freedom,” he added. “I think they should consider themselves very lucky for getting excessively lenient sentences.”
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