A crooked accountant stole hundreds of thousands of pounds from the companies she worked for in a tax payment scam.
Joanne Hughes was trusted to look after the tax affairs of small businesses but instead stole £280,000 from them in a brazen fraud. The accountant denied any financial wrongdoing, a stance she maintained until the fourth day of her trial at Cardiff Crown Court when she changed her plea.
It can now be reported that Hughes, from Porthcawl, has a previous conviction for laundering money for a drug dealer, and the judge warned her that a prison sentence of "considerable" length was inevitable.
The court heard that Hughes ran a business called JHB Services which had been employed by three firms - Trio Building Contractors, its sister company Trio Mechanical Services, and a firm called RJ Site Spray - to act as company accountant. It was the defendant's job to look after tax matters for her clients, and she ran a system whereby she would email the firms telling them what tax bills were due and how much they owed, and then ask them to forward the relevant amounts to her bank accounts for onward payment to Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs. In fact large amounts of that money was "simply was not paid" to the tax authorities but was kept by the defendant.
The case had been opened on the basis that between 2014 and 2018 the defendant stole £450,000 from the firms, but when she was rearraigned on Thursday she admitted three counts of fraud totalling some £280,000. The jury formally found her guilty of the charges following her change of pleas. Read about a man who leased a £36,000 Volvo car and gave it to illegal money lenders as collateral on a loan he took out - the Volvo is now missing but is believed to have been shipped to Poland by the loan sharks or their associates
Barrister Thomas Stanway, for the prosecution, said the amount of money 46-year-old Hughes had admitted to taking was acceptable to the Crown and the victims. He said a Proceeds of Crime Act investigation would now be undertaken.
The court heard that Hughes has a previous conviction for money laundering from 2019. This offence had seen her trying to buy property in Porthcawl for a cocaine dealer, and when police subsequently raided her house they found a box containing £40,000 in cash. Hughes - who was known at Hughes-Bassett at the time - was given a suspended sentence for that offending
Sentencing in the fraud case was adjourned to June 10 for a pre-sentence report to be prepared, and the defendant - of Pintail Close, Nottage, Porthcawl - was bailed to that date. Judge David Wynn Morgan told her to use the time between now and then to put her affairs in order as a custodial sentence was inevitable, adding that she was "going to be incarcerated for some considerable period of time".
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