Fraud
Fraud woman’s £2m luxury lifestyle
A woman who funded a luxury lifestyle by defrauding her employers of more than £2 million is facing a prison sentence, a court was told yesterday.
Sharon Bridgewater, a convicted fraudster who covered up her criminal past to get a job as a finance director, bought a fleet of sports cars and luxury goods with money that she siphoned off from company accounts.
Bridgewater, 36, spent £100,000 on a kitchen, which was featured in a glossy magazine as one of the best 25 in Britain, and £90,000 on an entertainment system for her living room. She spent another £100,000 on her partner’s birthday, including an £80,000 Ferrari Spider, which was parked alongside six Porsches and a BMW. She spent similar amounts on luxury holidays and furniture.
Further five-figure sums were spent on a luxury villa in Spain and a buy-to-let property portfolio in Britain, Southwark Crown Court was told. Dinner at top restaurants, including Gordon Ramsay at Claridge’s, cost up to £2,200, and bottles of wine that cost £500 were “drunk like water”.
In most cases of theft, the money was transferred to a dormant company that Bridgewater had set up years earlier and used in a previous fraud. On other occasions she “brazenly” paid for luxuries directly from the company account.
She removed £2 million secretly from Hicklin Slade & Partners, a marketing agency in Central London, before handing in her notice in an attempt to avoid being found out. Within weeks Bridgewater – described in court as a “lapsed accountancy student” and “greedy” – had selected her next victim.
Having set up an internet banking facility, she stole £55,000 from a small West End radio recording company, Universal Sound Principles.
Anthony Bate, for the prosecution, said that Bridgewater’s life of crime was stopped only when Hicklin Slade, her biggest victim, appointed auditors to help to identify why their company was in such a “parlous financial state”.
Bridgewater, who was living in Sudbury, Suffolk, before moving to Basingstoke, Hampshire, pleaded guilty to 16 charges of theft between August 1999 and May 2005. She also admitted two charges of furnishing false information and one of perverting the course of justice by trying to hide assets when the High Court imposed a freezing order after her arrest.
Her first “betrayal of trust” occurred in 1996 when, as accounts manager at Dyna-Five, a computer hardware firm in Epsom, she disguised thefts totalling £25,000 as payments to various suppliers and tax. She was exposed when her boss checked the company bank account and found that just a few pounds was left.
She pleaded guilty to eight false accounting offences and was sentenced to 150 hours’ community service. Shortly afterwards, having not mentioned that she was a convicted fraudster, she was appointed financial director at Hicklin Slade.
Her boyfriend, Robert Sangster, 34, a graphic designer, had denied any wrongdoing. He said that despite taking flying lessons and enjoying a luxury lifestyle, he had never suspected criminal acts. He told police and jurors that he was just a “kept man”, a “modern-day househusband”.
The jury convicted him of helping to pervert the course of justice but cleared him of two charges of money laundering. The couple, who are on bail, will be sentenced on October 26. Judge Brian Argyle, the recorder, said that neither bail nor the adjournment changed the “fact that a custodial sentence is uppermost in my mind”.
(Published by Times Online, September 26, 2007)
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