Woman gets four years for €1m cheque fraud

A PERSONAL assistant who stole more than €1million from her employers over a 14-year period has been jailed for four years.

Siobhán Maguire, 47, stole the money by fraudulently lodging her employers cheques to her personal bank account. Her lawyers told Dublin Circuit Criminal Court that she ‘dissipated’ the money over the years paying her mortgage, going on holidays and supporting her children.

Maguire, of The Brambles, Skerries, Co. Dublin, pleaded guilty to 32 sample theft and fraud charges related to lodgment of 660 cheques to her bank account on dates between 2001 and 2015.

She had been sent forward to the Circuit Criminal Court for sentencing on the offences after Jailed: Siobhán Maguire entering signed guilty pleas in the District Court. Maguire has no previous convictions.

The total theft involved amounted to €1,187,616. Maguire’s former employers have been partially reimbursed by banks and did not wish to make victim impact statements. The total outstanding loss is now approximately €325,000.

Judge Patricia Ryan noted testimonials and letters handed in from family and friends. She said she was taking into account the letters from Maguire’s children who were of a young age and not financially independent.

She said the aggravating circumstances of the case included the serious nature of the charge, the amount of money involved, the long period over which the offences were committed and the breach of trust. She noted the prosecuting garda was of the view Maguire would not re-offend.

Judge Ryan noted Maguire had entered an early guilty plea, that she had made full admissions, had no previous convictions and had displayed remorse which the prosecution accepted was genuine.

Judge Ryan imposed four years’ imprisonment on each count to run concurrently.

Garda Stephen Faulkner told Maurice Coffey, BL, prosecuting, that Maguire worked as a shared secretary and personal assistant to two people at offices in Church Street, Dublin, and began employment there in May 2001.

He said part of her role, over the 14 years of her employment, was to lodge cheques into the business accounts of the two men. He said that during this time she lodged 660 of these cheques, which she had falsely endorsed on the back, to her own personal account.

Gda Faulkner said the amounts on the fraudulently lodged cheques ranged from upper limits of €5,000 to a lower limit of several hundred euro. The money had been subsequently taken from her account in cash withdrawals, and gardaí were unable to trace it.

He said the fraud came to light in 2015 after a bank employee became suspicious of cheques Maguire lodged to her account through the self-service machines at Bank of Ireland in Smithfield.

Maguire’s bank account was investigated and a vast amount of cheque lodgments uncovered. She was suspended from her job and subsequently resigned. A Garda probe began and she made full admissions to all the offences.

Gda Faulkner agreed with Conor Devally, SC, defending, that Maguire had co-operated fully with the investigation and expressed genuine remorse. He agreed that the injured parties did not wish for Maguire to sell her family home to make up the shortfall in what they had lost.

Mr Devally said Maguire, who was separated from the father of her children, had at the time been paying the mortgage on their jointly owned home by herself and supporting her two children.

She lodged 660 cheques