A BOOKKEEPER who nearly crippled the company he worked for by siphoning off almost £200k to spend on cars, clothes, gambling and holidays, has been jailed for three-and-a-half years.

A jury found David Westwell, from Salisbury, guilty of transferring £194k from his employer’s bank accounts into his own.

The jury delivered their verdict on Thursday after a three-week trial at Winchester Crown Court.

Sentencing him, Judge Jane Miller QC told Westwell he had nearly brought the software company MNP Media to its knees in order to fund his gambling habit and particularly his love of expensive clothes, cars and holidays, which included visits to France, the Czech Republic, Greece, Belgium and Spain.

She said he had “created a smokescreen” which “grew and grew” involving the manipulation of payments that were “so complicated it took another bookkeeper months and months” to work out what had happened.

Westwell, 44, first took money from the firm when his boss, the sales manager and co-director Pierre D’Arbost, was away on an American road trip in June 2011.

Over the next 28 months, he disguised the payments in a number of ways, using the names of the company’s suppliers, making it look like money was going to pay the taxman and paying himself extra monthly salaries.

Co-director Nigel Casperd said the effect of Westwell’s actions on the business which has 45 employees had been ‘cataclysmic’.

The software company was started by Mr Casperd and Mr D’Arbost in 1999 and has a £2.5m turnover, with clients including Lakeland and LK Bennett.

Westwell, who was self-employed, first began working for MNP Media in 2007 on a part-time basis and, by 2011, he was put in charge of all the incoming invoices and payment of suppliers and staff salaries.

The court heard that his early work was checked but he was soon left to his own devices, having “complete charge” of the company’s finances.

By 2012, he was doing five days a week as the company expanded, being paid £32k a year.

During that year the directors realised Westwell was struggling with the workload and arranged for extra help, saying they made allowances for him because they were aware of his mother’s terminal illness.

They said it became more and more difficult to get account figures from him, but that Westwell had reasons for everything.

In April 2013, Westwell, of Pembroke Road, received £80,000 of his mother’s inheritance and he started putting money temporarily back into the company to prop it up so that staff salaries could be paid on time.

The fraud only came to light during conversations with HMRC when the firm’s former bookkeeper, who had returned to help, realised that the amount HMRC had received was different to that showing on MNP Media’s bank statements.

Westwell was sacked in October 2013. While he admitted transferring the money into his own accounts, he maintained throughout the trial that Mr D’Arbost had instructed him to do so in order to avoid having to pay the VAT liability.

Westwell said he had then paid the director back in cash.

Jailing him for fraud, Judge Miller said Westwell had defended himself in the “most unattractive way possible” by blaming Mr D’Arbost.

She said: “You were glib and a practised liar when you gave your evidence.

“Your approach was quite unpleasant when the directors had tried to be kind to you when your mother was ill and continued to pay you for two months after your dismissal.”

She added: “I’m quite sure that the prosecutor’s suggestion was true in that when you saw the directors’ income and lifestyle you simply decided to help yourself to that income too.

“This was dishonest and in breach of a high degree of trust.”

Noting the charge as a fraud by false accounting, she said that in sentencing him to three-and-a-half years she considered the abuse of a position of trust and the sophisticated nature of offences as well as the planning that had been required and the length of time it took place.

The total amount stolen by Westwell ran to £194,662.67.

Mr Casperd told the court the company had only recently finished paying back the hundreds of thousands of pounds it owed to HMRC as well as the fines it had incurred for late payments.