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Agencies & People

Letting agent jailed over £100,000 theft and fraud from employer

Woman who worked for Warwickshire sales and letting agent for over six years directed tenants funds to her own account.

Nigel Lewis

letting agent jailed rugby

A 37-year-old letting agent in Rugby “whose dishonesty knew no bounds” has been jailed for two-and-a-half years for stealing over £100,000 from her employer.

Rachel Cefai’s fraud is all the more shocking because the theft took place while she was serving a suspended sentence for stealing from her previous employer.

Cefai pleaded guilty in court last week to theft, two charges of fraud and breaching her suspended sentence.

Warwick Crown Court heard how Cefai began working at Rugby sales and letting agency Dunsmore Estates in 2010 and rose swiftly through the ranks to a senior position.

But in 2016 it came to light that she had been misusing the company credit card to the tune of nearly £3,000.

It also later emerged that she had directed cash deposits paid by tenants to her own bank account totalling £105,592.

Falsifying documents

Cefai managed to get away with the cash deposit theft by falsifying documents to show that the tenants owed the money to the company.

The court also heard that she stole furniture worth £900 from a pub that one of her colleagues had bought after gaining access to keys for the property.

During the hearing her legal representative urged the judge to pass another suspended sentence and revealed that the former letting agent had sold her home to repay the money she had stolen.

But Judge Peter Cooke pointed out that she had completed the unpaid work required under the terms of her previous suspended sentence during time claimed as paid leave from Dunmore Estates.

“You were told when the suspended sentence was imposed that if there was further offending, immediate custody would follow – but you went straight back to work and carried on stealing,” local paper the Rugby Advertiser reports.

April 23, 2018

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