A WOMAN who defrauded the Inland Revenue out of £275,000 to keep her cash-strapped business afloat has been jailed for two years.

Avril Elliott, 49, of Gilberstoun, Edinburgh, falsely claimed to HM Revenue and Customs that family firm Scothouses Ltd had paid £275,000 worth of VAT on goods and services from other firms, which was then refunded.

The fraud took place between June 2008 and September 2013, by which time she had amassed the huge sum which was used to support a bank loan keeping the firm afloat.

Elliot was sentenced at the city’s sheriff court yesterday after earlier pleading guilty to the fraud.

Sheriff Kenneth Maciver, QC, told her that without the regular illegal “cash injections” the company would no doubt have collapsed.

He said her actions amounted to “a wilful, deliberate, preconceived and carefully executed raid on the public purse, with every three months’ money, which you were not entitled to, being used to support a bank loan that was keeping afloat a company in which you had a one-third interest.”

The court heard Scothouses was now in liquidation, but that Elliot was a preferred shareholder and also owned property in the capital and a half-share in a Spanish property.

Defending, Angela Craig said the first offender had derived virtually “no benefit from the crime”.

She added that Craig’s sole motivation had been to save the family business during a “financial crisis” that she could not have foreseen and she expressed her “utter shame and remorse”.