Pay it back or stay in jail, fraud pair told
A FORMER Edge Hill university dean and his secret partner who conned the university out of £500,000 have been ordered to repay hundreds of thousands of pounds or face extra time in jail.
Robert Smedley made up a job for Christopher Joynson without doing any background checks or disclosing their relationship.
The checks would have revealed Joynson’s two police cautions for lying on previous job applications.
He claimed his salary for about five years and billed the university, which is Ormskirk, for £200,000 for several hours of extra consultancy work he had not done.
The high payment sent alarm bells ringing in Ormskirk university’s finance team, and Lancashire police were called in.
Police soon discovered the couple spent some of the money on expensive home including kitchen.
Last year, Smedley and Joynson, both of Frankby Road, West Kirby, were both jailed for five years at Liverpool Crown Court after being found guilty of fraud.
On Friday, December 21, they appeared back before the court for a proceeds of crime hearing.
Smedley was found to have made a benefit of £236,170.61 and ordered to pay back £159,970.25 by improvements, a luxury February 19 or face another 18 months in jail.
Joynson was found to have made a benefit of £211,146.42 and ordered to pay back £127,300.70 by February 19 or face another 18 months in jail.
Last year’s trial heard that as well as creating a post for Joynson, Smedley also authorised payments for his invoices for consultancy work for five years.
Jacob Dyer, prosecuting, said: “The defendants were dishonest from the outset.”
Smedley was found guilty of five fraud offences, and Joynson of four fraud offences.
Smedley, who worked at Edge Hill from the late ’90s until 2014, was once a leading ambassador and spokesman for the university.
As dean of the faculty of education, he met visiting government ministers, and spoke to the media on a range of issues, from teacher training to the global economy. He resigned in 2014.
After the two men were jailed last October Det Con David Wainwright, from Lancashire police’s economic crime unit, said: “Smedley was a member of senior management and abused that position for personal gain. He deceived the university, in particular colleagues he had known for many years and employed Joynson, his lover, in a position that he had simply devised himself.
“Joynson invoiced the university for hours and hours of work that he had not undertaken, sharing the money with Smedley. They used the cash towards expensive home improvements including a luxury kitchen.
“The financial impact on the university - the innocent victim in all this - cannot be underestimated; between the pair of them, they managed to defraud Edge Hill of over half a million pounds which could have been put to much better use.”