A fraudster who pretended to work for Greggs to con the council out of more than £700,000 in Covid grants has been jailed for four years.
Aftab Baig, 47, of Glasgow, contacted Leeds City Council in May 2020 claiming to be a group property manager at Greggs head office.
The authentic-looking email was from a fake corporate email address and included a list of all 32 outlets in the city.
It asked for business rates numbers for Leeds branches, details which the sender said he could not access himself due to lockdown.
Baig and others used the details to apply for rates relief from the small business grant fund, a scheme set up by the Government to help small businesses stay afloat during the pandemic.
The court heard Baig ultimately swindled the council out of £710,000 through the fraud and arranged for the money to go into the bank account of his own food takeaway business.
The council realised the claims were fraudulent five days later and the account was frozen.
While most of the money was later returned to the local authority, more than £90,000 was left outstanding.
Baig was arrested in Glasgow in July 2020 by Police Scotland officers and £16,000 was found at his house, as well as forged remittance slips which officers believed he was planning to use to persuade the bank to return the frozen money.
Baig was found guilty of three counts of fraud in February.
The court heard he took advantage of a system set up in lockdown to deal with claims ‘quickly and with minimal security checks’ to cause minimal disruption to businesses.
Jailing Baig for four years, Judge Guy Kearl, the Recorder of Leeds, said: ‘This was a disgraceful attempt to deprive the Government of monies which were in short supply at a time of extreme public anxiety and crisis.’
Kelly Ward, from the Crown Prosecution Service, said: ‘Baig took advantage of the difficult circumstances of the pandemic in 2020 to defraud the council out of taxpayers’ money.
‘Those who cheat the public purse are stealing funds which should rightly go towards services and the community, or in this case towards supporting small businesses through an extremely challenging time.’
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