A newsagent jaile
d for his part in a £2.3 million fraud delivered papers in a £50,000 Mercedes. Anthony Nickerson and his wife Julie, had years of h
igh life by stealing millions from her laundry company employers. The 48-year-old then laundered just under half of the cash by transferring and concealing it through a newsagent business he owned. The pair spent the cash on lavish luxury holidays, a house worth half a million pounds which came complete with five acres of land, a hot spring and swimming pool and a fleet of Mercedes cars. For years locals were left scratching their heads as to how Mr Nickerson – Britain’s most well-heeled paper ‘boy’ – could afford a Merc with the registration number ‘News’.
The couple also splashed £17,000 on film memorabilia from Christie’s Auction House in London and spent a further £10,000 on motorsport events at Silverstone. Last month, Mr Nickerson admitted transferring and concealing just under £925,000 between July 2009 and December 2012.
In December last year, his wife pleaded guilty to stealing £2.3 million from JLA Ltd between 2005 and December 2012 after she was made redundant. Mrs Nickerson, who worked in the accounts and finance department at the firm in Halifax, West Yorkshire, was jailed at Bradford Crown Court today for five years. Her husband received a two-and-a-half year prison sentence. A customer outside the couple’s former shop in Shelf, near Halifax, West Yorkshire, told: ‘It was a standing joke in the village about all the money they had.’He used to nip about delivering the papers in his fancy Merc with its private reg. That’s when he was in the country because he always seemed to be on holiday.
They had this massive farmhouse and I used to say to the wife they must be making a pretty penny from that shop. Now we know where it all came from – she had her hand in the till at work. ‘Nickerson, who worked as an employee at the firm which supplies commercial laundry equipment between 1990 and 2012, stole the cash over a seven-year period beginning in 2005.
The court heard her husband turned a blind eye to his wife’s dishonesty, and was told by the judge ‘you helped her’ with a theft ‘in breach of trust’. Recorder Anthony Hawks told Mrs Nickerson, who sobbed as the sentence was read out: ‘You have taken in excess of £2m. You and your husband didn’t need that money.
‘There was no pressing need for the money for an operation or a sick family member. You were comfortably off. ‘What you did was to embark on an orgy of greed and self-indulgence which only came to a head when you were made redundant. ‘You lived a lavish lifestyle. You took holidays that other people could only dream of. You spent thousands of pounds of sports memorabilia. You bought expensive vehicles. The list goes on.
‘The aggravating feature is that you also covered it all up when the Inland Revenue discovered your affairs.’
adapted from The Daily Mail
