Essex man jailed after stealing £3m from company
56 year old Rhys Jackson, of Chelmsford, has been sentenced to 9 years in prison
A dishonest financial controller who stole more than £3 million from his employer, costing dozens of jobs when the firm went into administration, has been jailed for nine years.
Rhys Jackson, of Chelmsford, Essex, also fraudulently claimed for three government-backed Covid-19 bounce back loans, receiving £150,000.
The 56-year-old had previously been jailed in 2007, for seven years and six months, for stealing from a previous employer and he was banned from being a company director for 15 years.
Brian Russell, prosecuting, told Chelmsford Crown Court that Jackson started working for JC Watson Refrigeration Ltd in 2013 as financial controller.
Over a period of four years, from 2014 to 2018, Jackson made 638 transfers of money from the company to 12 separate personal bank accounts belonging to him, the prosecutor said.
These payments totalled £2,946,107, the barrister said.
He said this theft was the "sole reason" the firm went into administration in 2018, and that it had employed "about 40 people" at the time.
When a director of the firm started a new company, JCW Mechanical Ltd, he was "only able to employ about five" people, Mr Russell said.
The prosecutor said that from April 2018 the defendant made a further 184 transfers of money to his personal accounts from the JCW Mechanical Ltd bank account over a period of around 11 months.
These payments totalled a further £326,508.
A colleague at the company, Katrina Tighe, described in a victim impact statement read to the court how she got calls from people who were angry that they had not been paid due to the issues.
"One man said he would visit the offices and break both kneecaps," she said, adding: "He doesn't care and he has no remorse."
She said Jackson "transferred money into his accounts under the guise of going to suppliers".
Judge Alexander Mills told Jackson: "This was a sustained and deliberate abuse of trust just years after you had come out of prison for doing it before."
He said that the defendant had "somewhat cynically... offered help and support to get the second company on its feet then continued to take money from that".
He said that Jackson, despite being disqualified from being a company director, had "acted as a director in all but official title" with his "former wife, a hairdresser, as apparently the director of DR Refurbishments Ltd".
He said there was a "high degree of dishonesty".
The defendant was convicted of 14 offences including theft, fraud, fraudulent evasion of VAT and acting as a shadow director of a company in contravention of a disqualification order.
The judge jailed him for nine years and disqualified him from being a company director for 15 years.
He also made a five-year Serious Crime Prevention Order, and said that confiscation proceedings will follow.
The judge said, having heard mitigation, that he took Jackson's "ill health" and the impact on his family into account when passing sentence.
Jackson showed no reaction as he walked, assisted by a stick, to the cells.
Steve Doyle, assistant director, Fraud Investigation Service, HMRC, said afterwards: "This case began as a tax fraud investigation, but it quickly became clear that Jackson was targeting numerous victims.
"Not only did he defraud the UK taxpayer by submitting false VAT claims, but he also stole eye-watering sums of money from his employer, as well as Covid Bounce Back Loan cash.
"We will always follow the evidence to bring fraudsters to justice and to ensure there's a level playing field for those who abide by the law.
"We encourage anyone with information about any type of tax fraud to report it online."