A FORMER senior manager at Edinburgh City Council has been jailed for 12 months after embezzling more than £100,000 as part of a housing repairs fiddle.
John Warne, who lived in Longniddry in East Lothian, stole the money in connection with a VAT repayment fraud and spent it on cars and holidays.
The crime emerged as police investigated VAT-related fraud in the repairs system. A separate inquiry into Edinburgh's former statutory notice system, run by the Property Conservation and Property Care departments, has been ongoing.
Up until 1998, the council mistakenly charged VAT on repair bills for homeowners. A team was set up inside the local authority, of which Warne was a member, to recoup the cash from HMRC and give it back to homeowners.
However, 55-year-old Warne diverted £122,925.39 for his own benefit. He did so between July 2008 and May 2010, spending the money on classic cars, home improvements, mortgage payments on buy-to-let properties, and lengthy holidays for relatives.
His crime only came to light after he had taken early retirement from the council.
He has since made a full repayment, which included the sale of his family home.
After pleading guilty in November, on Friday the former team leader in the council finance section was jailed for one year.
Sheriff Frank Crowe said of the sentence: "I am taking into account your previous good record, that full repayment has been made and that your plea of guilty was tendered at a very early stage.
"Nevertheless, I am left with a situation where you, as a public servant, embezzled funds from the council for your own benefit and to make gifts to friends and family.
"I was urged to consider making a maximum 300-hour community payback order.
"However, a breach of trust of this magnitude can, in my view, only be met by a prison sentence."
The council declined to comment.
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