Fraudster forced to sell ill-gotten gains

Lesley Pickens

A finance manageress who stole almost £500,000 from a charity because she claimed she was too broke to support her family was ordered to sell her two homes and Mercedes car yesterday.

Lesley Pickens (59) was jailed for three years and four months in February after pocketing the money while she was working in the accounts department of a youth charity, where she had been employed for more than 20 years.

Pickens, of Knowls Lane, Lees, claimed she had carried out the thefts because her husband was made redundant and they were in dire financial straits. She said she was £40,000 in debt when she was arrested.

But a judge ordered Pickens to pay back £145,980 after financial investigations revealed she had two cottages with surrounding land, a Mercedes, plus £6,600 cash stored in two bank accounts.

The money will come from the sale of the cottages and the car.

At Manchester Crown Court, Pickens was ordered to pay back the cash within six months or face a further two years in jail.

She pleaded guilty to 25 counts of fraud and asked that a further 112 offences were also taken into consideration.

The court heard how, since 1987, Pickens had worked as a finance manager in the accounts department of Manchester-based Rathbone, a UK-wide voluntary youth sector organisation. During the last 10 years of employment, Pickens began transferring money from the charity to a personal bank account on an almost monthly basis. She made 132 of these transactions between March 1998 and April 2008, totalling £479,133.81

The court heard that management at the charity which had a turnover of 31million pounds and employed 800 members of staff across the country first became suspicious in June 2007 when a number of transactions could not be accounted for.

When Pickens was off work on compassionate leave following the death of her husband in April, 2008, it emerged that 19 transactions from Novembe,r 2006, averaging £5,000 were made to her personal account.