Fraudster Relf has wrecked all our dreams
8:00pm Monday 17th October 2011
A BUSINESSMAN has told of his devastation after a fraudster accountant stole more than £100,000 from him and caused his business to go into administration.
Stephen Relf took so much money from A&J Exhibitions, run by Tony Allery, of Colchester Road, West Mersea, it went bust.
Relf, who has been jailed for five years, caused 55 job losses after he was convicted of taking £103,398.13 from Mr Allery’s firm. Mr Allery says he is now forced to work 14 hours a day as a labourer.
He said: “All we really wanted is retirement without any worries.”
Mr Allery, 47, who spent 20 years building up the company, has been left credit blacklisted and unable to start a new business.
The entrepreneur said A&J Exhibitions was the biggest of four companies he ran and he had been turning over £5million a year. The company employed Relf as its accountant in 2007 and within a year, Mr Allery said he grew suspicious about how the finances were being handled. He added: “I started to realise something wasn’t right. He was giving me profit and loss figures that didn’t seem right, but blaming things on late invoices.” In June 2009, Mr Allery was faced with the agony of telling his 55 employees they were going into administration. It was only when Relf, earning £37,000 a year, was arrested last October for admitting stealing cash from a pharmaceutical company, that investigators discovered his frauds of A&J Exhibitions. The scam was uncovered when his bankers, MBNA, became suspicious about a £15,000 payment into his credit card account. He stole more than £120,000 from the accounts of the other company, Miller and Miller, based in Hainault, east London. In both cases, his technique involved moving sums of money from the firm’s account into his own and listing the transactions as payments to suppliers. Relf, 51, of Upper Brentwood Road, Romford, admitted two counts of fraud by abuse of position at Snaresbrook Crown Court. He is due to have his remaining assets seized at a hearing on March 5 in an effort to pay back his victims. Mr Allery’s partner Julie Salter, 47, said: “People are saying he has got his just desserts, he is in prison, but that doesn’t change the way our lives are going to go. I am devastated for Tony because I am not the one that has put that amount of work in. “We always said because we have got the land at the back of the house, when we sold the company, we could put a little animal rescue centre there. “But you have to have money to do that sort of thing. What really gripes me is you have your dreams and talk about the future and what you would like. That’s what really gets me.”