Manager took £39,000 of charity’s cash
A TRUSTED charity manager stole tens of thousands of pounds from his employees with a series of frauds and thefts.
Jac Davies worked for the charity behind the restoration and running of Cardigan’s historic castle after moving back to West Wales from London.
But over a two-year period he pilfered almost £40,000 from the group with a variety of scams including setting up an online gift shop where the takings were paid into his own bank account, and spending thousands of pounds on the charity’s corporate credit card at Tesco, Next, Apple itunes, and the Celtic Manor hotel and resort.
A judge branded the former civil servant and hotel boss a “thoroughly dishonest individual”.
Swansea Crown Court heard Davies became business opportunities manager at the Cardigan Castle charity in 2017. But very quickly he began stealing money from the group.
Danielle Lodwig, prosecuting, told the court about four ways the defendant took money from the charity.
The first involved claiming to have enrolled on an online business course as part of Master’s programme with ecornell – Davies said he had paid the £4,143 fees himself, and produced what he said was a receipt when claiming the money back. It later emerged he had never enrolled on the course and the receipt was not genuine.
Davies’ second scam involved proposing and launching an online shop for the charity, with payments being taken via the Paypal system.
The prosecutor told the court money from purchases made by members of the public at the online shop actually went into Davies’ Paypal account before being transferred to other accounts he controlled, including one at Santander.
More than £2,000 was stolen using this method.
The court heard that the third way 34-year-old Davies defrauded the charity was use its corporate credit card for his own purchases – in total almost £29,000 was spent.
The fourth method used by the defendant was more basic – as part of his role at the charity he was responsible for banking the weekly cash takings from the on-site castle gift shop, but he simply took the money home and did not deposit it. By these means Davies trousered more than £5,600.
The court heard that during his two-year tenure at the charity trustees repeatedly raised concerns about what was happening but Davies came up with a series of explanations when challenged including blaming errors in the Paypal system, saying the charity’s credit card and his own account had somehow become “merged” thanks to issues at the bank, and claiming cash from the shop might have been taken by opportunist thieves after he placed envelopes of money on his window sill ready for banking.
The prosecutor said repeatedly misled and lied trustees of the charity.
Eventually the police were contacted, and a full investigation into his activities over the previous two years revealed what had been going on – Miss Lodwig said the total amount taken from charity by theft and fraud was £39,161.
The court heard that in a series of police interviews Davies made some admissions about wrongdoing, but also denied many of the allegations, at one stage swearing on his daughter’s life that he had not taken the cash from the castle shop and providing a series of explanations which included the cleaner accidentally throwing it away.
Davies to the
Jac Owen Davies, of Dol y Dintir, Cardigan, had previously pleaded guilty to two counts of fraud by false representation and two counts of theft by an employee when he appeared in the dock for sentencing.
Judge Paul Thomas QC said what Davies had done had not been a one-off or a “momentary lapse” but was a “sustained course of deliberate dishonest conduct”.
He told the defendant: “There can be no other description of you, I’m afraid, than you are a thoroughly dishonest individual.”
The judge said he had read personal references submitted to the court on the defendant’s behalf which referred to him using terms such as “trustworthy”, “upright” and “a man of integrity”.
He said: “All that means is that you managed to fool them about your true character as well.”
The judge added that swearing his innocence on his daughter’s life had been “despicable” thing for Davies to do.
Giving the defendant the required one-third discount for his guilty pleas the judge sentenced him to 21 months in prison, suspended for two years, and ordered him to complete 200 hours of unpaid work and a rehabilitation course.
The court heard Davies has lodged £40,000 with his solicitors ready to reimburse the charity or its insurers.