Bride stole £200,000 from boss to pay for her wedding

Part-time accounts assistant Kirsty Lane, 30, channelled funds from her employer’s bank account into her own and her future husband’s.

Her fraud was uncovered just days after she married Graham Lane, 36, near Blackpool, in January last year.

Today, Lane, of Lewis Close, Adlington, Lancs, was sentenced at Preston Crown Court.

Passing sentence, Judge Pamela Badley said the “modest” first amounts of cash she stole from the company escalated and funded a luxury lifestyle.

Judge Badley said Lane’s behaviour was “fraudulent from the outset”, adding: “This was a cynical exploitation of the small company for which you worked.”

As well as paying for a lavish wedding which included a free bar, musicians, fireworks, a magician and face-painting, Lane also used the cash to pay for a number of home improvements at the couple’s home, including items such as a 52in TV, a Tag Heuer watch, an iPod and personalised car registration plates.

Kirsten McAteer, opening the case for the prosecution, said: “Once she started stealing money, she couldn’t stop. She was afraid Mr Lane would leave her when he found out the truth.”

Lane’s fraud was discovered by Peter Sutton, the managing director of Pure Audio Visual, for whom she worked.

There had been a complaint from a customer about an invoice which led him to investigate the company’s finances.

Closer inspection revealed that Lane had been creating false invoices in order to siphon the company’s cash into her own accounts.

Lane was sent a letter from the Leyland-based business which stated she had been suspended because of suspicions about her thieving when she returned from a three-day honeymoon break in the Lake District.

The court heard she made 122 payments to herself between December 2008 and January 2011.

Around £122,000 went into her own account, with £70,000 going into her husband’s account and a further £6,000 paid into a third account.

The court was told that Mr Lane was acquitted of any wrongdoing after a retrial in May and that Lane herself had “exonerated” her husband of any wrongdoing.

The couple met in 2007 and Mr Lane had travelled up from his home in Luton to move in with the single parent and her daughter in August 2010.

She pleaded guilty last October to 10 counts of fraud by abuse of position and asked for a further 112 similar offences to be taken into consideration.

The court heard that Lane’s fraud damaged the company, which then employed 18 people, at a time when it was struggling with “cashflow” issues, which resulted in two people being made redundant.

Miss McAteer said Lane had been a “trusted employee” and she had the main responsibility of looking after the company’s accounts.

She said the company had paid her a good salary, bonuses and she even received a wedding present from her bosses, who at first wanted to believe there had been some sort of mistake.

Amanda Johnson, defending, said Lane was a woman of good character who suffered from low self-esteem and that the offending coincided with the time she met her husband.

“She felt that money and the trappings that money could buy would make her a more attractive proposition,” Miss Johnson said.

She said Lane thought she could “make herself more attractive to him by having money and being able to spend it on gifts and holidays”.