A letting agent found guilty of stealing money from tenants and landlords has been warned she faces jail.
Amanda Mann, 43, allegedly spent £6,000 on breast reduction surgery and also splashed out on Jimmy Choo shoes.
Mann was found guilty at Caernarfon Crown Court of 17 counts of theft. She had denied any wrongdoing.
The court heard she had worked for Fletcher and Poole in Conwy, and was made lettings manager ten years ago.
Prosecutor Elen Owen said Mann, who had been regarded as a friend by her employer, had systematically syphoned off money that should have gone to the company.
Tenants’ deposits and application fees had been stolen, and commission fees paid by landlords not passed on.
The charges involved £7,500 and spanned nearly four years, but the prosecution claimed the total amount missing was more than £90,000.
Mann, who had lived in a flat above the office, was suspended and then sacked in 2011, and police called in.
She is due to be sentenced next month and has been remanded on bail pending a pre-sentencing report.
Recorder Timothy Petts warned her: “Custody will be uppermost in my mind.”
Modus Operandi?
Dear Ros, with your site now firmly established, up and running free of the restraints of advertiser pressure please can I make a request? Whenever a story like this one is reported please can you try to find out which software is being used to aid the misappropriation? (not necessarily mention it in the story)
Many, many agency principals are walking a tightrope blind to the threat posed by staff like this and I would estimate that although the number staff who require surgery or have an uncontrollable retail habit will be limited and fairly few and while PI insurance takes care of this financial loss many firms are running risks which are unnecessary and not understood.
Errant staff might account for a few cases of misappropriation each year but by far the biggest threat comes from the systems and training being employed; in some cases client money can evaporate . It isn’t the staff or procedure that is at fault but sometimes a single line of code buried deep inside hundreds of thousands lines of codes some of which were written many years before. Legacy code as much as 25 years old poses a genuine threat to agency reputation and it is a matter that none of the trade associations; RICS, ARLA and NAEA, the consumer organisation NALS or the Kite mark scheme SAFE seem to pay any regard to. A £32.4 billion industry is now being run by systems that have never been externally tested *and it is about time rather that just trust the products being supplied and allowing support staff to rectify anomalies as they come up someone ought to recognise what is a proven but industry wide ignored issue.
We have had several years of the term rogue agency being bandied about, there are no doubt rogue agents but no-one it seems is stopping to spot the pattern in the roguery that might indicate a common, unexpected, source. There is huge benefit in simply finding out which system was in place in each of the stories reported and keeping a note of what is actually going on, there is an underlying story with many of these cases which will only become apparent if it is recorded over time.
*ICAEW accreditation is not a test of mathematical accounting accuracy, it is a tick box test of standard operating procedures.
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