Lawyer stole £600k to spend on call girls and sex phone lines
He said Parkinson’s drug made him ‘hyper sexual’
A LAWYER who stole £600,000 from elderly clients to spend on call girls and adult chat lines has been jailed.
Andrew Taylor, 57, visited up to 90 escorts, claiming that drugs he was taking for Parkinson’s disease left him with ‘hyper sexuality’.
The solicitor was highly respected in the village where he lived, serving as treasurer of the local cricket club.
But he raided the bank accounts of 13 clients for whom he held power of attorney, aged between 67 and 100, to fund his sexual habits.
Manchester Crown Court heard that he gave one call girl £30,000. Over two years, he also made 808 payments to adult chat line and webcam services totalling more than £ 100,000. Taylor kept the names of all the escorts he used on his mobile phone and paid them a total of almost £80,000 over three months.
Another £ 85,000 was splurged on internet auction site eBay, which Taylor used to buy ‘ pens, pottery and cricket memorabilia’, the court heard. Yesterday Taylor who specialised in probate, wills, trusts and Powers of Attorney at his firm Andrew J Taylor Solicitors in Cheadle, Greater Manchester, admitted fraud charges.
Seven of his victims, may of whom were suffering from dementia and lived in care homes, died before they could see him jailed for four years.
Andrew MacIntosh, prosecuting, said: ‘In 2010 he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s and at around the same time his son had had a breakdown.
‘He said that this and the pressure he was under at work and his medication caused him to behave in the way that he did. He said one of the women he had met on the chat lines had asked him to lend her some money and that he had taken some money from a client account to give to her. In the end he gave her £30,000. He said that having done it once he got carried away, began spending his own clients’ money and got sucked into a self-destructive mode.’
The court heard Taylor’s victims were robbed of sums between £1,200 and £400,000.
One woman of 87, who lived in a care home, died after her account was plundered of £3,000, and at the time her estate had insufficient funds to pay for her funeral.
Taylor, of Cheadle, was arrested in July 2013. Mr MacIntosh said: ‘Taylor said that he believed that the drugs which he had been taking for his Parkinson’s had affected his behaviour.’
In all, Taylor stole £623,920. In mitigation, defence counsel Kate Blackwell QC said her client’s son, who had suffered with schizophrenia took his own life a few months ago, which had also caused him to spiral ‘out of control’.
‘Under pressure at work’