Eight months in jail for St Paul's stamps theft woman

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THE DISGRACED manageress of a cathedral gift shop has been jailed for eight months after using church funds to order more than £58,000 of stamps, before selling them for half-price on eBay.

Alison Robinson, 44, who moved to Brixham after the deception to start a new life with her new husband, was jailed yesterday at Southwark Crown Court for eight months.

Robinson, of Wishings Road, placed more than 30 orders for a total of 56,500 Royal Mail worldwide stamps while working at St Paul's Cathedral gift shop, and continued the fraud even though a £154,000 inheritance was looming following the death of her parents.

"This was a deliberate course of dishonesty carefully planned and deceptively executed," Southwark Crown Court Judge Martin Beddoe told the first-time offender.

Robinson pleaded guilty to dishonestly obtaining worldwide postage stamps, worth £58,289.15, from the Royal Mail with the intention of permanently depriving the Friends of St Paul's by deception by falsely representing she was entitled to order them between February and May, 2007.

Prosecutor Miss Sarah Selby told the court Robinson left St Paul's in June, 2007 following 18 years' unblemished service for the Friends of St Paul's shop and the new manager, Duncan Smith, ordered a yearly stock take.

"He found various substantial discrepancies in the accounts," she explained.

"Large amounts of the stamps had been purchased by the shop and invoices signed by Mrs Robinson.

"These stamps were ordered and paid for by the shop, but not sold in the shop."

Robinson had placed telephone orders for stamps along with the shop's usual order for postcard stamps and deliberately omitted the fact from internal paperwork.

"When they arrived she placed them in a safe and then took them away," added the prosecutor.

St Paul's hired a retired senior Fraud Squad detective, Patrick Wilkins, to investigate and he quizzed Robinson at the new home she had bought for £158,000 cash in Brixham and shared with her new husband, a former cathedral colleague.

"She claimed she sold them to friends, but then admitted she sold them on eBay for half of their value," Miss Selby told the court.

Robinson claimed she was kept a virtual 'prisoner' for 20 years by her 'domineering' wheelchair-bound mother who died in 2006, followed by her father six weeks later.

She said she had spent the money on household items to help the care of her parents and on the funeral costs.

Robinson recently sold her house for £122,000 so she can compensate St Paul's and immediately wrote a letter of apology to the Dean.

Her lawyer Miss Dafna Spiro told the court: "This is so out of character.

"Her mother was domineering and oppressive in the extreme. She was not allowed to move away and spent the next 20 years at home caring for her parents although they were difficult. It is an aberration. Something she is mortified about."

Once her parents died, Robinson was free to marry an older man, who they had disapproved of, quit St Paul's and start a new life in Brixham.

Judge Beddoe told Robinson: "It's not taking money out of the till, but setting up a process that allows her to take out of the till.

"She chose a product that she knew she could sell elsewhere and stole it."

The judge rejected Robinson's family background as an excuse.

"You deliberately embarked on a system of dishonesty of your own design on a product of value," he told her.