AN RAF officer has been jailed for defrauding the Ministry of Defence of tens of thousands of pounds while he was on active service in Afghanistan.
Jason Fletcher passed on fake invoices to his superiors and kept around £92,000 for himself after being tasked with setting up radio stations among Afghani communities.
It took place between 20 July and 7 September 2011 when Fletcher was serving as a flight lieutenant in the Royal Air Force, stationed at Lashkar Gah in Helmand Province.
The officer was part of a support unit whose role was to educate, inform and influence the civilian population, organisations and key figures in the province through one-to-one engagement, literature and radio broadcasts.
At one stage he was given four invoices totalling £35,426 for radio contracts from three privately-owned radio stations serving the Lashkar Gah district.
But instead of providing the correct amount he provided seven fake invoices for the contracts to representatives of the Ministry of Defence totalling £127177.
Fletcher then paid off the original invoices and kept the rest for himself. In total, the fraud was worth £91,751, all of it paid in US dollars.
The Lossiemouth-based officer was caught after returning to the UK at the end of his tour of duty when he began to exchange batches of the cash from dollars for pounds in a wide range of banks and currency exchanges, predominately in the Lossiemouth, Elgin and Inverness area.
Fletcher, who pleaded guilty, carried out a total of 16 currency exchanges, collecting a total of £25,311.
An MoD spokesman said it had a zero tolerance policy towards fraud. He added: "We hope that his sentence serves as a warning to others that fraud within the military will not be tolerated."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article