Accountant who stole £350,000 is spared jail... because she’s ‘not stuff prisoners are made of ’
AN ACCOUNTANT who stole £350,000 to feed her gambling addiction has escaped jail after a judge said she was ‘not the general stuff of which the prison population is made’.
Natalie Saul, 37, blew most of the money playing online poker after raiding the accounts of technology firm Idio, based in London’s Fitzrovia district.
But her defence argued the fraud was ‘out of character’ for the mother of one, who was a committed charity worker and had been ‘shaken’ by the loss of her grandmother.
Judge Catherine Newman QC said yesterday she was going to jail Saul for more than three years but had been persuaded that she was unfit for prison. Despite admitting it fell outside of sentencing guidelines, she handed her a two-year suspended sentence and 250 hours’ community service at Southwark Crown Court.
It is the latest in a string of cases where a female defendant has been spared jail.
Earlier this month, Polish model Natalia Sikorska, 28, was let off with a conditional discharge after she was caught shoplifting nearly £1,000 worth of goods from Harrods. Westminster magistrate Grant McCrostie told her: ‘ You are obviously a woman of considerable talents.
‘Because you pleaded guilty at the earliest opportunity and you do have a potentially bright future, we will deal with this more leni- ently than we should have.’ Southwark court heard how Saul, who lives in a £1million terraced house in South-West London, changed the details of more than 400 fake invoices between March 2015 and December 2016.
As office manager, she was able to alter the information to her own bank account, pay herself in cash, and then switch the bank details back to avoid detection.
She confessed only when a colleague covering her maternity leave spotted the fraud. Saul – who stole £348,439 in total – pleaded guilty to one count of fraud.
Defending, Lucie Daniels said: ‘This offending is so out of character – she has worked hard and paid her taxes and been a responsible citizen.’
Passing sentence, Judge Newman said: ‘Your grandmother’s death rocked the stability of your hitherto good citizenship. You had a steady partner who had no idea of your gambling addiction and stands by you. I’m prepared to take the wholly exceptional course of reducing your sentence and suspending it.’
As Saul burst into tears, Judge Newman added: ‘You abused your position of control over your employer’s bank account. ‘You devised and created over 400 accounts for stealing money by a fraud using a sophisticated method which involved some planning. Each account required six steps. First, you raised fake invoices to the company account system. Secondly, you used knowledge of auditing to reduce risk of detection. You amended the bank details of the recipient to your own bank account. You paid the invoices to yourself. Then you changed the bank details back to the original supplier.
‘Finally you marked the invoices as paid. You did this for over a year. It has caused considerable harm to your employer which could ill afford to lose such a substantial sum, but thankfully survived.’