Six-year suspended sentence for Louth woman after €475,000 fraud
A Louth woman who defrauded her employer of €475,000 over a three-year period has been given a six-year suspended sentence at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court.
Lorraine Gregory (aged 37) used the €475,000 in forged company cheques to buy a house and fund the purchase of other luxury items such as an Audi A4 car and a foreign holiday.
The court heard the defrauded company has since stopped trading after years of operating successfully.
Gregory, of Forest View, Wheaton Hall, Drogheda, pleaded guilty to 23 sample charges of theft and forgery on dates unknown between August 2001 and March 2004 at telecommunications company Off Air Electronics Ltd in Tallaght.
Judge Patrica Ryan noted the company was taking civil proceedings against Gregory and Bank of Ireland to recoup the rest of the money owed to them.
Gregory has repayed €307,200 of the money and was trying to repay the rest at €400 a month.
Judge Ryan imposed a term of six years, suspended in full for four years. She added she was not making any order regarding the repayment of the money because of the civil proceedings.
“Finality needs to be given to the company and the loss to the company has to be taken into account,” said Judge Ryan.
The court previously heard company director Mr Donal Keys entrusted Gregory to compile monthly bank reconciliations and told gardaí that he never had any concerns with her performance. Gregory was also in charge of forwarding newly issued Bank of Ireland cheque books posted to the company offices directly to Mr Keys.
Detective Sergeant Pascal Walsh told Ms Tara Burns BL, prosecuting, that in early 2004 Mr Keys became concerned when, after a review of a company bank statement, he noticed two cheques cashed out of sequence with the normal company rotation of payments.
Bank of Ireland told Mr Keys they would forward him these cheques after he contacted them querying the entries.
In April 2004 Mr Keys then identified another two cheques cashed out of sequence. When he contacted Bank of Ireland for further clarification, the bank informed him that they had uncovered a further five cheques cashed outside of the usual time frame.
Over the course of the Easter bank holiday weekend, Mr Keys enlisted the help of the defendant in deciphering the cause of the out-of-sequence cheques.
Mr Keys told gardaí that he became suspicious when Gregory said she identified the payments as cheques sent to the Collector General and a freight company, each of whom had cashed their cheques late.
Det Sgt Walsh said a subsequent search of the premises by Mr Keys revealed no corresponding VAT invoices to the payments Gregory had supposedly identified.
When Mr Keys made further attempts to have the offending cheques couriered to him from Bank of Ireland, Gregory intercepted them and kept them to herself.
Gregory then showed Mr Keys a series of forged cheques made out to the Collector General and a transport company and told him these correlated to the out-of-sync payments.
When Mr Keys voiced his scepticism, Gregory confessed that the cheques were actually made out to her name and that she had altered the payee name to back-up her concocted story of late VAT and freight company payments.
Gregory also told Mr Keys that her sister had admitted to stealing a company cheque book, after Bank of Ireland drew his attention to a number of cheques made payable to Gregory’s sister and husband.
When Mr Keys demanded that Gregory’s sister bring the cheque book back immediately to the company offices, the accused told him that her sister was recovering from a mastectomy in hospital and could not be reached.
Mr Keys then went to his local Bank of Ireland branch where he recognised the handwriting on the cheques as that of Lorraine Gregory.
Confronted with the evidence, Gregory confessed and signed a statement to the effect that she had forged the signatures of the directors of Off Air Electronics Ltd on stolen company cheques to the value of €170,000.
She also confessed to obtaining a contract from her employers to purchase a tanning salon in Phibsborough to the value of €140,000 under false pretences. Gregory had already lodged €70,000 with her employer to fund the purchase of the property.
After a meeting between the two families, Gregory’s father agreed to pay €20,000 to the Keys family in a lump sum and a further €300,000 within a 30-day period by way of recompense for his daughter’s fraud.
The Keys family contacted gardaí when they realised that Gregory’s liability in fact far exceeded the €300,000 she and her father originally agreed to pay back.
In interview Gregory admitted to using the proceeds of the forged cheques to fund the purchase of a new car and house, book a holiday abroad and attempt the purchase of a tanning salon in Drogheda.
Det Sgt Walsh agreed with Mr Aidan Toal BL, defending, that although Gregory’s fraud was quite complex, it was not a clever one as she lodged the cheques into accounts belonging to her and members of her family and had left a paper trail “a mile long”.
Det Sgt Walsh said that on a personal level he would think it unlikely that Gregory would appear before the courts again.
Mr Toal told the court that his client had no clear explanation as to what compelled her to commit such serious fraud, but that she told him it was something which “took over” her life.
Judge Ryan said that Gregory failed to take responsibility for her crimes when afforded the opportunity on several occasions. She said Gregory was in a position of trust and there was a complete breach of that trust.
