Former Post Office worker ordered to pay back £100,000

Crime: Woman jailed for 40 months used money for online gambling

A postmistress has been ordered to hand over the £100,000 she embezzled from her elderly employer and a community group.

Carol Oswald, 53, from Perth, was told to pay thousands of pounds to the estate of one of her victims, who has since died. Oswald was also told to pay nearly £90,000 to the Post Office.

She had embezzled the cash to fund her gambling habit.

Overall, she was ordered to pay £89,573.84 to the Post Office, £8,059.80 to the executors of Jean Johnston’s estate, and £2,367.36 to the Letham Climate Challenge, of which she had been a trustee.

Oswald is serving 40 months in prison after she was caught embezzling cash from her work, the owner of the Post Office, and a community charity. She was jailed in May. As the sub-post office manager Oswald frittered the money on internet betting and claimed she kept going to try to win back money to pay for the losses the business was racking up.

Oswald also stole more than £8,000 from the elderly woman who trusted her to run the Post Office.

She stole directly from 81-year-old Jean Johnson, but also left the pensioner – who owned the Post Office business – liable for the £100,000 Oswald embezzled from the branch.

Solicitor Cliff Culley told the court: “The money was taken from the Post Office account and put into her personal account and she gambled it. “She just felt totally out of control. “She accepts a significant amount of money was taken from the Post Office to fund that gambling habit.

“It wasn’ t a sophisticated, pre-planned fraud. She was out of her depth.

“She wasn’t funding an extravagant lifestyle. She didn’t have holidays.

“She lived in fear of being found out and it was inevitable she would be found out.”

She had been found to have also ripped off an environmental charity in the local housing estate where she had been a well-known and trusted pillar of the community.

Oswald was asked to set up a bank account for the city’s Garth Avenue-based Letham Climate Challenge but it emerged she had not done so and had simply kept the tax payments.

She accepts a significant amount of money was taken from the Post Office to fund that gambling habit. SOLICITOR CLIFF CULLEY