An independent financial adviser who stole almost £400,000 from vulnerable clients who placed implicit trust in him has been jailed for three years and four months.

Glenn Wrighton, 63, was guilty of “a grotesque breach of trust” against four women, three of whom were elderly and one who had suffered a tragic bereavement, the judge said.

Three times married Wrighton was led off in handcuffs to the cells at Bradford Crown Court yesterday.

The court heard he lived in a £400,000 house while trading as Yorkshire Financial Clinic Ltd and stealing £384,595 over a 16-year period.

Judge David Hatton QC told Wrighton: “People had invested with you significant sums, and to them very significant sums, in order to cater for their financial futures and those of their loved ones, which futures you wholly destroyed.”

The judge said the consequences for the victims and their families were “devastating, financially and emotionally.”

Wrighton, protected, enhanced and propped up his own financial security with “systematic and repeated thefts”.

It was “a grotesque breach of trust” over a long period of time.

“Each had implicit trust in you which you wholly abused by systematically stealing from them, concealed by elaborate lies,” the judge said.

Wrighton, of Bradley Road, Silsden , pleaded guilty at Bradford and Keighley Magistrates Court to four offences of theft, between 1989 and 2005. He was sent to the Crown Court for sentence.

Prosecutor Jayne Beckett said £311,731 of the stolen money was still outstanding.

She said Wrighton’s business had been liquidated and was nothing to do with an accountancy firm called Glen J. Wrighton and Co.

Wrighton voluntarily turned up at Keighley Police Station on October 13, 2010, with two crates of documents relating to his wrongdoing.

Mrs Beckett said his first victim was an elderly woman, now blind and living in a nursing home.

Wrighton stole £47,481 from her and £157,000 from a woman he had known for 20 years after they met through a church in Keighley. Her husband was killed in a car crash and Wrighton was asked to invest money for herself and her children. She told the police she had lost all her life savings.

Wrighton stole £163,000 from Vera Maunder who died in 2003. His dishonesty deprived the five beneficiaries of her will of their inheritance.

Wrighton worked for Grattan in Bradford in the 1980s where Mrs Maunder’s late husband was employed.

Wrighton stole £16,101 from an elderly woman by pocketing the dividend money from shares she inherited.

Wrighton, now married to a Ukranian woman, blamed the thefts on two divorces, stock market crashes and family problems. He had rented a £400,000 house in Oxenhope , saying he did not want to move to a smaller home.

After the case, DC Matt Wilkinson, of Airedale and North Bradford CID, said: “Glenn Wrighton abused his position of trust that had a far reaching impact, not only on the victims but also their families.