IT manager swindled firm to pay for his lover’s whims
A MANAGER at a financial advice firm swindled his company out of more than £127,000 to pay for gambling and to maintain an “extravagant lifestyle” for a woman he was involved with.
Simon Rey was caught out after he ran up a £32,000 phone bill at the Money Advice Group’s expense.
Rey, 40, used the money he defrauded from the company to pay for the whims of the woman he was seeing, who it was said had been violent towards him.
But he also lavished expensive goods on himself, including a TV and computer, as well as using company money to pay for his drinking and gambling.
More than £23,000 of the phone bill was racked up while Rey, of Connah’s Quay, was in Thailand.
When the phone bill “raised some eyebrows” at the Manchester-based firm he worked for, he was interviewed by police and admitted ordering property on behalf of the company but keeping it for himself.
Profits at the firm at the end of the 2015 financial year had been £7m, but in the year ending in June 2016 the firm posted a loss of more than £363,000.
Investigators found that IT manager Rey had benefited to the tune of £127,000, but his defence barrister at Minshull Street Crown Court in Manchester said this was only a “ballpark figure”.
Timothy Storrie added Rey was living in an “emotional powder keg”, being physically and verbally abused by the woman he was involved with.
He added: “Spending other people’s money became a chief strategy to try to get out of this situation.”
He said Rey had assured a woman he had been involved with that he would pay for her “extravagant lifestyle” after she lost her job.
Sentencing Rey, of Nant Road, Connah’s Quay, Deeside, to 20 months in prison, Judge Mark Savill said: “This was a significant period of time in which you committed this offence.”