£186k fraudster pretended to be cancer sufferer
ABOGUS accountant who pretended to have cancer has been jailed for swindling a client out of £186,000.
David Weller, formerly from Weston-super-Mare, set himself up as a tax agent even though his only training was in bookkeeping and came from a cell mate when he had been in jail for a previous fraud.
He left a building firm with a VAT debt of £117,000 after falsifying its returns and pocketing most of the money that should have been paid.
He tried to cover up his swindle by claiming to be seriously ill with bowel cancer when in fact he was about to go to prison for ripping off a different client company in Bristol.
Weller, pictured, carried on ripping off the West Midlands-based building company Westmid even while he was being investigated for the earlier fraud. He took a total of £186,000 over three years by inflating their VAT liabilities and not only pocketing the excess but also failing to pay much of what they should have owed.
Boss Robert Powers had to repay the taxman from his own pocket when the fraud came to light in 2018.
Weller, of Bartholomew Street, Exeter, and formerly of Addicott Road, Weston-super-Mare, admitted fraud and was jailed for three years and eight months by Judge
Peter Johnson at Exeter Crown Court.
He told him: “You told the writer of the probation report that you may have a character flaw. You do. You are profoundly dishonest.
“So it was that you masqueraded as someone well versed in accounts and set up an accountancy business, when in fact your only knowledge came from a fellow prisoner while serving a previous sentence.
“It is said you were doing quite well but fell on hard times, so you decided to defraud Mr Powers’ company. It was a blatant and serious breach of trust. You have not shown a scintilla of genuine remorse.”
Brian Fitzherbert, prosecuting, said Weller carried out the fraud between 2015 and 2018 while operating as a tax adviser in Exeter and Somerset.
He creamed off between £10,000 and £20,000 from each quarterly payment by artificially inflating the liability, failing to pass on money to HMRC or both. The result was that he took £186,480 and left Westmid and its director Mr Powers with an unpaid VAT bill of £117,000.
Mr Fitzherbert said: “In 2018 he passed the paperwork back to the company and said he had bowel cancer and needed time off for an operation and to recover. He disappeared and could not be contacted.
“In fact he was not ill at all but was imprisoned in March 2018 for evasion of tax.”
He has a history of dishonesty going back to 1992, when he was first sent to jail for stealing from an employer.
He was jailed again in 2011 for an identical VAT fraud to this one, carried out while posing as an accountant, and again in March 2018 for swindling £150,000 from Bristol garage equipment company BWS.
He was stripped of his entire assets of £49,000 under the Proceeds of Crime Act while serving that sentence, so had no means of repaying Westmid.
Miss Kelly Scrivener, defending, said he has had this case hanging over him since being released from the 2018 sentence last February.
He has shown remorse and has been working in charity shops to try to make some recompense to the community. She added that he has lost his wife and home and is currently living in a rented flat.