A mother who used £250,000 of her company’s funds to pay for a ‘lavish lifestyle’ to fund holidays and designer clothes has been jailed.
Angela Boote, 51, spent the money on exotic family trips and jewellery before being caught when a £224 account discrepancy was flagged by her employer while she was away on holiday.
A court heard she had suffered with depression and was ‘trying to spend to make herself feel better’, but had begun paying the money back.
Boote showed no emotion during the hearing while her husband, into whose joint accounts she had siphoned some of the cash, sat shaking with tears in the public gallery as she was led away to the cells to begin her three years and four months sentence.
She was employed by the insurance brokers, Griffiths and Armour, for 26 years and began her string of offences in January 2017.
She made 96 fake transactions totalling £255,854 involving payments into her own account, one of her daughters and two joint accounts with her husband.
Boote began as an account assistant in the company and was promoted to accounts clerk and was responsible for credit control and initiated payments to clients for refunds or overpayments.
When challenged by her line manager in September 2020, after returning from holiday, about the £244 discrepancy she claimed she had put her daughter’s bank details in by mistake and tried to fob off investigations.
But after checking the accounts her line manager found she made 17 other payments into her daughter’s account.
Further inquiries revealed the other illegal transactions which Boote, of Lower Lane, Fazakerley, Liverpool, had covered with a sophisticated electronic false paper trail and she was suspended and later dismissed for gross misconduct.
Lionel Greig, defending, said she accepted “She has not only let her family down but her work colleagues and employers who trusted her implicitly.”
She has no previous convictions and is primary carer for her husband, who suffers from chronic pain, and her 92-year-old mum. She has repaid £84,000 back from an inheritance and has been engaging with civil proceedings he added.
He explained that she had been “trying to make things better for herself and the depression she was suffering from but she made the situation worse.
“She was trying to spend to make herself feel better but it was never going to succeed.”
The judge, Recorder David Knifton, QC, told her: “An aggravating feature is your attempts to conceal your offending and the fact the funds were used to support a lavish lifestyle including the purchase of particularly expensive holidays.”
