Man who landed £120,000 job at oil firm is jailed for lying on CV

AN OIL executive who lied on his CV in order to land a £120,000-a-year job has been sent to prison.

David Scott, 48, forged three qualifications from Herriot-watt University in Edinburgh and Imperial College London, in one case awarding himself a First in petroleum engineering.

He also said he wrote an acclaimed academic paper entitled Nonparametric Regression For Analysis Of Complex Surveys And Geographic Visualisation. On the basis of his glowing CV, Scott was made managing director of Mechtool, an engineering company in Darlington, his main task being to oversee two multimillion-pound heat and blast protection contracts in Kazakhstan.

Scott, of Marwood Wynd, Stainton, Middlesbrough, was paid a £120,000 salary, a resettlement package, £10,000 car allowance and bonuses. But within weeks his new colleagues began to suspect Scott was woefully out of his depth and investigated his background.

Simon Perkins, defending, told Teesside Crown Court: “We accept he was entirely criminally wrong to fabricate his CV. He has no degree, he was a relatively junior soldier who trained as a surveyor and had the facility to use his GPS surveying knowledge to go into geo-surveying.”

Sentencing Scott to 12 months for fraud by false representation, Judge Peter Armstrong said: “How you thought you were going to get away with this is difficult to imagine.

“You were asked to produce a strategic plan, which I have read, and it is quite clear you were simply not up to the job. This was fraud at the highest end of CV falsehood,” he added.