A council finance officer has been jailed after pleading guilty of fraudulently transferring £80,000 of business rates cash to his friends.
Matthew Ravey also created false insolvency documents for himself and friends while working as a business rates officer at Rochdale Borough Council.
Ravey pleaded guilty to three counts of fraud and one count of theft and was sentenced to one year and six months.
Detective constable Sarah Langley of Greater Manchester Police’s Fraud Disruption Team said: “It’s clear from correspondence that Ravey imagined himself as some sort of criminal mastermind who’d concocted a fool-proof plan to get rich while avoiding his debtors.
“But frankly, the decision to use his employer’s email address to orchestrate it was one of many frankly bizarre factors in his ill-considered scam.
“After being confronted, he even tried to deny he’d done anything wrong – despite the paper chain from his computer clearly implicating him and his co-conspirators in his desperately flawed con job.”
Five others were sentenced to community service for their part in the crimes.
