Exclusive:Portsmouth City Council worker who stole £72,000 of taxpayer money given suspended sentence

A crooked accountant who stole more than £70,000 of taxpayers’ money has been spared jail.

Amirun Begum, 49 from Sheffield Road, Fratton, took £72,582.17 from public coffers between April 2022 and January 2023, a court was told. Begum, who worked for the council for 27 years, worked in the accountancy department of the housing office, taking cash payments at the end of each day and scratching them off her daily financial reports.

In essence, she would “record a lower figure than what had been paid, then pocketed the difference,” Judge Michael Bowes KC was told. The cash was pumped into Amazon gift cards, in a bid to disguise her ill-gotten gains.

Once Portsmouth City Council discovered the discrepancy, an investigation was carried out and the police were contacted. Begum, who lost her job as a result, admitted her offences at the first opportunity, pleading guilty to one count of theft by employee.

She was also charged with one count of acquiring criminal property, and one count of false accounting, but was not sentenced for these indictments, which were instead kept on file.

In mitigation, the court was told that Begum herself was defrauded in 2021, having applied for a loan from a supposed company out in Kenya - which turned out to be a scam. The court deemed that the defendant was coerced and intimidated into paying off her scammers, who inundated her with messages and threats.

Sentencing, Judge Michael Bowes KC said: “This is a serious offence. The city council serves the community, and is funded by public money, which you stole.

“You frequently cashed up monies received, and would print the daily cash total reports. You changed the amounts, and kept the difference. The police were involved and you subsequently lost your job.

“You became involved through coercion, intimidation or exploitation - the court has been provided with the substantial string of messages between you and those purporting to offer you a loan.

“That does not excuse your theft of public money, but goes quite a long way to explaining what happened.”

Judge Bowes sentenced Begum to eight months in custody, suspended for two years, and ordered her to carry out 200 hours of unpaid work. No compensation order was made.

A Portsmouth City Council spokesperson said: “Acts like this are rare and we take all incidents of this kind very seriously. Once we were made aware of the situation, we investigated the matter and referred it to the police. Appropriate management action was taken and the individual no longer works for the council.

“We want to reassure tenants that their services were not affected by this incident, which took place three years ago. We manage around 17,000 homes, so the amount of money involved, while significant, makes up a very small part of our total annual rent income. At the time of the incident, we reviewed our processes around cash handling to mitigate against this highly unusual incident happening again.”