Civil servant stole more than £1.7m from Ministry of Justice to fund lavish lifestyle

By Rachael Burford, BBC Local Democracy Correspondent

A civil servant who stole more than £1.7 million from the Ministry of Justice to buy a lavish home and cars has been jailed for three-and-a-half years.

Allan Williams, 37, masterminded a “sophisticated” fraud by setting up payments to a fake company for two years undetected.

Williams, who as a Grade 7 civil servant would be earning £50,000-£60,000 a year, used the cash to buy an Audi SQ5, an Audi A3 and a five-bedroom, 1.1-acre manor house in Hampshire.

Before the fraud he had been living in a £290,000 three-bedroom semi-­detached house in Essex with his family.

At Williams’ sentencing, prosecutor Gregor McKinley told Southwark crown court: “This was a sophisticated fraud and would have resulted in further loss to the taxpayer if it had not been discovered.”

On July 23, 2017 Williams created a £7 million purchase order for an “IT services contract” from “Sopra Business Consulting” and set up a monthly payment to it. But the firm was bogus, and the money was transferred from the company’s bank to his personal account.

He was caught when a junior civil servant became suspicious of a transaction in July 2019.

Williams, a manager in the MoJ’s commercial and financial control sector, tried to convince him the payments were legitimate, the court heard.

But the employee reported them. Police found Williams had transferred almost £1.4 million of MoJ funds to himself, and £400,000 was in the fake firm’s account.

Williams, of Bentley, Hampshire, pleaded guilty to fraud and transferring criminal property. Judge Joanna Korner QC told him: “You conceived of this plan to make yourself richer. It was both sophisticated and greedy.”

A MoJ spokeswoman said the department had recovered £900,000 of the stolen money so far, and was “pursuing the remaining amount”.

She said: “Williams used his knowledge of our controls to circumvent them. We have since carried out a further review to ensure it would be even harder to commit such an offence.”