Letting agent sentenced to three years in prison over £302,000 theft

A letting agent has been sentenced to three years and two months in prison after stealing hundreds of thousands of pounds from his employer.

28-year-old Robert Parker was convicted in November after he admitted stealing £302,000 between 2010 and 2018 while working at Nina Lettings Agents in Barry, Wales, and has now been sentenced.

Parker, who was a University drop-out, had been employed as a junior member of staff at the agency by a close friend of his mother’s and was a hard working member of the team, eventually being promoted to lettings manager.

Letting agent

He developed a close relationship with the businesses’ owner Nina Chivers and her husband, with whom he often went cycling.

But Parker, who is a father-of-two children, had developed a gambling addiction and at one point was spending up to £50,000 a month on horse racing, and also enjoyed a ‘materialistic’ lifestyle including luxury goods and holidays.

“To have a betrayal like that when I never ever would have doubted his integrity, and the fact that I knew his family, was just unbelievable,” Nina Chivers told the BBC.

“Because I knew him and his family I never doubted his integrity for a minute and trusted him, and he was hard working and never had a day off sick.

“But every day he was working he was thinking of a new way of defrauding and conjuring up what he could.”

Parker will now be subject to a Proceeds of Crime Act proceedings with a hearing due to take place on May 20.