Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
PENMAN IT CAN BE SLOWLY, SLOWLY CATCHY CONMAN
In my eagerness to see fraudsters brought to book I might sometimes be guilty of not appreciating just how hard this can be.
Take conman Stephen Day. After police raided his properties they came away with two Transit vans filled with boxes of evidence.
The accountant was charged five years ago and has only now been jailed for 11 years and five months for fleecing NHS trusts, businesses, plus one count of date fraud.
“He’d been in charge of complex finances for so long he thought no one would catch up with him and that no one would be able to put the jigsaw pieces together,” said prosecutor Ben Reid of the Specialist Fraud Division of the Crown Prosecution Service.
“He would camouflage bank transfers, taking a chunk of client money and sending it to his own bank accounts but label it as money going to HMRC.
“We had this enormously complex web of transactions and had to disregard how it was labelled.
“He was also forging key documents including client bank statements.”
Day, 53, swindled his way to £1.3million, and bought a property empire that included a Scottish mansion which featured a salmon stream running through it.
Behind him there was a trail of
misery, including a home care business that had to lay off 30 staff after he stole £420,000, and flat owners whose properties plummeted in value after he emptied £160,000 from the reserve fund of the building management company, leaving just 10p behind.
At one point he was getting paid £2,000 a day from three NHS trusts but he rarely turned up to work at any of them.
In sentencing at Leeds crown court, Judge Simon Batiste said: “This was industrial-scale dishonesty purely to fulfil your own greed.”
Mr Reid told me after the hearing that the case was full of “delay and posturing” by Day right up to the end, when he tried to arrange a hospital appointment to postpone sentencing.
“I charged this case in May 2016, it took until February 2019 for him to plead guilty to everything.
“Then it wasn’t until this month that he finally stopped arguing about how much he owed and we could get him sentenced,” he said.
“We’ve got a substantial prison sentence, we’ve disqualified him as a director for nine years, we are going to get a serious crime prevention order against him and will look to confiscate whatever he’s got left.
“It’s taken a long time but we’ve finally got justice.”
‘‘ He would take a chunk of client cash but label it for HMRC