£100,000 benefit fraudster spared jail

JON MACPHERSON

ABENEFIT cheat who pocketed more than £100,000 after failing to disclose that she was living with her husband has avoided jail.

Agnieszka Pryzbylska of Crosley Grove, Accrington, tried to persuade fraud investigators that her husband was ‘gay’, was not living at her address and was only there to ‘clean her fish’, a court heard.

The mum-of-three was overpaid £91,411 in tax credits from HMRC between April 2011 and August 2016, and £14,722 in housing and council tax benefit from the council between July 2012 and February 2016.

Pryzbylska, 38, pleaded guilty to two counts of benefit fraud and was given a 20-month jail sentence, suspended for 12 months. Julian Goode, prosecuting, told the court that the tax credit fraud was ‘not fraudulent from the outset’ but that the housing and council tax benefit fraud was.

Investigations showed Pryzbylska had lived with her husband at her last three addresses and was backed up by documentation from his employer and television licence applications.

Mr Goode said surveillance was carried out and showed her husband’s car was ‘parked on a regular basis outside her address early in the morning and late at night’.

When interviewed in February 2016, she denied the fraud and ‘suggested her husband was gay and that they were not a couple’, the court heard.

In a second interview in April 2016 she provided a tenancy agreement where she maintained her husband was living with his brother and would ‘only come round early in the morning to clean her fish’.

Philip Holden, defending, said Pryzbylska had been paying back the money since July 2017 at the rate of £60 per month.

Judge Beverley Lunt said it would ‘take about 170 years to repay it at £60 a month but it matters’.

Sentencing, she said: “This is a lot of money, it’s a substantial amount of money. If I send her to prison she loses her job, she won’t repay anything and then she will come out of prison with no job and claim benefits again.

“There’s nothing in the pre-sentence report that leads me to believe she has entrenched criminal views, her remorse and contrition seem very genuine.

“Her relationship with this man is, to say the least, extraordinarily unusual, but she should have told him he was there.”