Frizinghall office worker pocketed £9,000 in cash from Shipley firm's safe (From Bradford Telegraph and Argus)

Frizinghall office worker pocketed £9,000 in cash from Shipley firm's safe

10:00am Saturday 26th January 2013 in News

A greedy office worker plundered cash from the safe of a Shipley private tutoring business, her employer told Bradford Crown Court.

Single mum Rachel Kelly, 29, managed the books at the Kip McGrath Education Centre in Kirkgate and pocketed £9,033 paid by parents as fees for out-of-school lessons.

Between September 2009 and May 2010, mum-of-four Kelly, of Rachel Kelly, of Norwood Road, Frizinghall, recorded cash payments as cheques paid into a bank account and took the notes to tackle her money problems.

The crime was discovered when accountants found the shortfall and she appeared for sentence yesterday after pleading guilty to theft and fraud.

Her boss Frank Page said in a victim statement: “Over the last two year and a half years Rachel Kelly has dragged my family, her own elderly father, her young children and myself through hell.

“This was a heartless catalogue of sustained thefts perpetrated through nothing other than her insatiable greed.”

Judge Colin Burn sentenced Kelly to ten-month suspended jail sentences to run concurrently on both charges and ordered her to repay £4,500 by this August and the remaining £4,533 by February 2015.

In mitigation for Kelly, Simon Hustler, told the court that the thefts had merely been financial “sticking plaster” to try to solve her wide-ranging troubles.