A council accountant who stole more than £70,000 of taxpayers' money to pay off Kenyan scammers has avoided prison. Amirum Begum, 49, worked in Portsmouth City Council's housing office accountancy department for 27 years before her dismissal.
How the theft occurred
Begum recorded lower figures for payments made by local residents and pocketed the difference. She converted the stolen funds into Amazon gift cards. The council discovered the discrepancy, launched an investigation, and contacted the police, leading to her losing her job.
Portsmouth Crown Court heard that Begum had been defrauded in 2021 after applying for a loan from a supposed company in Kenya, which turned out to be a scam. She was later coerced and intimidated into paying off the scammers, who inundated her with messages and threats.
Sentencing and impact
Between April 2022 and January 2023, Begum stole £72,582.17. She was sentenced to eight months in custody, suspended for two years, and ordered to complete 200 hours of unpaid work. No compensation order was made. She had pleaded guilty at the first opportunity to one count of theft by an employee. Charges of acquiring criminal property and false accounting were kept on file.
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.'
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.'
