| Finance director stole to fund lifestyle |
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| Sunday, 28 October 2007 | |
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Finance director Sharon Bridgewater presided over redundancies at her employer until she was discovered to have stolen £2m to fund luxury cars and holidays.
Bridgewater, 36, managed to swindle millions of pounds out of two other companies in her role as finance director after being convicted for fraud. She was jailed for five years at Southwark Crown Court after pleading guilty to 16 counts of theft. The Court was told that Ms Bridgewater was "a lapsed trainee accountancy student" who had started her dishonest activities in 1996. Claiming to be a trained accountant, she worked as an accounts manager at computer hardware firm Dyna-Five in Epsom, Surrey. She was discovered to have disguised thefts totalling £25,000 as payments to HM Revenue and Customs and a number of suppliers when her boss checked the company bank statements and found just a few pounds left. The company went bankrupt. Bridgewater pleaded guilty to eight charges of false accounting and received a sentence of 150 hours of community service. High life Shortly afterwards, she successfully managed to conceal both her conviction for fraud and her lack of bona fide qualifications as an accountant to secure a job as Finance Director at Bloomsbury-based marketing firm Hicklin Slade & Partners in London. She explained her absence at times when she was serving her community sentence to colleagues by saying she was involved in charity work. Between August 1999 and May 2005, she developed a taste for the high life, including exotic holidays in Barbados, the Maldives, Sydney and Dubai, fast cars and dinners at expensive restaurants, that she was able to fund by stealing from her employer. Described by her barrister as a "female Walter Mitty" - after the fictional character who leads a fantasy life -, Sharon Bridgewater, of Basingstoke in Hampshire, swindled millions out of the company, eventually driving the firm into forced redundancies. She ordered executives at the firm to "keep a close eye on expenses" as she sat in meetings aimed at trying to avoid the firm going bankrupt. Meanwhile, she spent her spare time enjoying £2,200 a time meals that were accompanied by £500 a bottle wines at the Manderin Oriental hotel and TV chef Gordon Ramsay's restaurant at Claridge's in London. She bought seven buy-to-let homes in Britain and a villa in Spain and spent £100,000 on a Ferrari Spider, flying lessons and other gifts for her boyfriend's birthday. A £115,000 makeover resulted in her kitchen being featured in a glossy magazine as one of Britain's 25 best. Described in Court as "living the life of a footballer's wife", she installed a £90,000 entertainment system in her living room and had a "jaw-dropping" collection of flash cars, including a classic 1955 Speedster and five other Porsches plus a state of the art BMW. Problems Southwark Crown Court heard that Sharon Bridgewater had used a dormant company set up years earlier for use in previous frauds in most cases of theft. On other occasions, she "brazenly" paid for luxury purchases straight from the company's account. She resigned from Hicklin Slade after thefts totalling £2 million landed the firm into serious cashflow problems and the ground became too hot under her feet. She quickly managed to get a new job at the small West End radio recording firm Universal Sound Principles. Within weeks, she had siphoned off £55,000 of the firm's cash into a new online banking facility through unauthorised withdrawals and wrongful salary payments. Her fantasy life funded by fraud and theft came to an abrupt halt when Hicklin Slade commissioned auditors to probe its inexplicably poor financial situation. Confronted with the allegations, Bridgewater continued to try and lie her way out of trouble, which even led to the arrest of one of her former colleagues. Trust Passing sentence in front of a sobbing Bridgewater, recorder Brian Argyle said: "Because of their trust in you, they did not check or audit the accounts which you had done and the performance of the company deteriorated because of the losses from your stealing. You sat in meetings as staff were made redundant around you without saying a word." Sharon Bridgewater's boyfriend Robert Sangster, 34, received a nine month prison sentence, suspended for 18 months, after being found guilty of misleading the course of justice by trying to conceal the existence of two Porsches and a Ferrari bought for him by Bridgewater. He previously told the Court that he was "a kept man" and "a modern-day househusband" who had never suspected that his partner's £78,000 a year income as a finance director alone was not sufficient to fund the couple's lavish lifestyle. Speaking outside Southwark Crown Court after sentencing, Detective Superintendent Dom Lucas said, "She was selfishly prepared to have innocent family members and friends arrested where people had acted on her instructions and innocently assisted in the disposal of criminal gains." Related articles
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