Mother is jailed over theft of €460k after day of court drama
A MOTHER-of-two who stole over €460,000 from a multinational firm to keep her own struggling company afloat burst into tears as she lost her battle to avoid going to prison.
Lisa Lynch, 33, a former company boss who faces losing her home by April over ‘substantial debts’, had been sentenced to 18 months in prison on December 12 last.
But Judge Martin Nolan allowed her to spend Christmas at home after he was told that she had yet to inform her children, aged three and seven, of her offending. She was ordered to return to court to be jailed on January 11.
But in the meantime, as exclusively revealed by the Irish Daily Mail on Monday, she launched an emergency appeal bid to avoid going to prison, which was heard yesterday, the day she was also due to be sent to prison.
Although she partly won that appeal last night – as appeal judges took six months off her sentence – she was taken straight to jail to serve the remaining 12 months.
In a day of drama starting at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court, Judge Nolan threatened to jail her straight away at 11am, before her appeal hearing could get underway. The judge pointed out that he had given her ‘generous time’ over Christmas to get her affairs in order.
But barrister Lorcan Staines, for Lynch, persuaded the judge to postpone the issuing of any warrant for Lynch’s imprisonment, to allow her appeal to be heard first, which was scheduled to start at 2pm. Later in the Court of Appeal, Lynch sat in the dock dressed in a black trouser suit as appeal judges reduced her jail sentence from 18 months to one year in view of ‘very significant’ mitigating factors in her favour.
And although she had the option of spending another night with her family before presenting herself at the Dóchas Centre, Mountjoy’s women’s wing, at 11am today, she indicated through her lawyers that she instead wanted to start her sentence straight away.
When she burst into tears, Judge Birmingham told her: ‘Sit down Ms Lynch, I understand this is distressing.’
As a director of transport company AGL Logistics, Ms Lynch stole from Bibby Financial Services over a number of months in 2011 and then laundered it in a bid to keep her own company going, it was heard.
To do this, she created a total of 93 false invoices.
As they were treated by Bibby as true invoices, €460,660 was advanced on foot of them. She was ‘out of her depth’ when she took over AGL Logistics, with about 70 employees, from her husband Andrew at the age of 24, days after her youngest child was born by caesarean section.
At around the same time, her husband was diagnosed with cancer and this left her unexpectedly in charge of the company despite her ‘minimal business skills’, it was heard.
Lynch was jailed last night even though she is currently the household’s ‘main breadwinner’ and appeal judges accepted that she hadn’t acted out of any ‘personal greed’.
In recent times, she had been working for her brother-in-law, earning €485 a week.
Her husband has enrolled on a back-to-work scheme and ‘may have particular difficulties coping in the year ahead,’ appeal judges acknowledged.
It also emerged yesterday that one of her young children is suffering from medical difficulties.
Lynch wept as she was led away by a prison guard from court just before 5pm.
With the maximum possible one-third remission, she could be released as soon as this August.
‘I understand this is distressing’