An oil executive earning £150,000 a year was locked up for swindling her company out of nearly £1.4million.
Jacqueline McPhie, below, spent the cash she embezzled on a Range Rover Sport and luxury clothes and holidays. The scam came to light when she bought properties in Aberdeen and Stonehaven.
Over the course of 12 months, Jacqueline McPhie pocketed the huge sum from Portlethen oil firm Altus Intervention while working as their vice-president of finance.
The mother-of-one then splurged the cash on a Range Rover Sport, designer clothes and luxury holidays, and fitted her home on Aberdeen’s Great Western Road with a new kitchen and a bespoke summer house.
McPhie, 46, who was earning £150,000 a year, devised a plan to divert funds from the company using her now estranged husband’s firm.
Her fraud – which her husband knew nothing about – only came to light when she used cash to buy two properties in Aberdeen and Stonehaven. Yesterday, McPhie – who has a previous conviction for embezzling £250,000 from a firm in Renfrewshire – appeared at the High Court in Edinburgh to be sentenced.
Defence advocate Tony Lenehan pleaded with judge Lady Wise to be lenient with his client, who now lives in a caravan in Arbroath with her parents. He said her dad had an “untreatable blood clot” next to his heart and claimed McPhie wanted to help care for him. Mr Lenehan told the court she had only carried out the offence because she was “very unhappy” in her relationship with her husband.
McPhie sat with her head in her hands and sobbed as Mr Lenehan said: “She feels that she was placed under pressure to provide wealth for her family unit. She found that she secured happiness in her relationship by providing material wealth to her family unit.
“She was the main source of income. Her husband’s company did not make much money.”
But Lady Wise said there was no alternative than to jail McPhie for her actions.
She said: “You are 46 years old and had, what many people would regard, an enviable existence.
“You enjoyed a salary of almost £150,000 per annum, you were married with a child, your husband also had work.
“Your motivation can only have been greed, to have even more material wealth than your position allowed you to accrue.”
She jailed McPhie for three years and four months.
Despite having a conviction from embezzling £250,000 while working as a finance manager with Iventec in Inchinnan in 2000, McPhie managed to secure a top job at Altus Intervention.
She had full “oversight” of the company’s finances and the trust of her bosses when the offences were committed between March 1, 2013, and April 29, 2014.
The complicated scam involved faking invoices and e-mails from senior Altus Intervention staffauthorising payments to her husband’s business account – which she had full access to. When quizzed by staff at Altus, McPhie lied and said the payments related to the creation of a new branch in Cyprus.
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