The former head of finance at an Aberdeen-based oil services company has admitted stealing more than £1.3 million from her employer.
Jacqueline McPhie, who lives with her parents in a caravan in Arbroath, was paid almost £150,000 a year by Altus Intervention – despite having a previous conviction for embezzlement.
She admitted the theft yesterday at the High Court in Edinburgh. Sentence has been deferred to 31 May for background reports.
Prosecutors said that McPhie, 46, was a ‘trusted employee’ with full oversight of the company’s finances.
But she betrayed that trust by buying an £80,000 Range Rover, spent more than £60,000 on a new garage and driveway, £52,000 on a kitchen and £30,000 on a summer house in her garden, and spent thousands more on designers clothes and foreign holidays from her stolen cash.
Altus has since managed to recover more than £238,000 from McPhie.
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