A skilled accountant who used his financial nous to steal over £700,000 from his employers has been given a three-year jail term for his crimes.

Over a period of seven years, Andrew Richards, cleverly manipulated the bookkeeping figures at two different companies where he was employed, with discrepancies in VAT records at the first company only noticed once he had left.

Between 2005 and 2008, the divorced father who suffered from clinical depression, diverted more than £530,000 from Lift Able UK into his personal account, before leaving his senior management accountant role and moving to Python Properties as consultant director of finance.

Prosecutor Rachel Masters told Teesside Crown Court that having 'absolute trust', Richards took almost £180,000 from the struggling property developers over the course of two years.

The illicit funds were used to pay off his mortgage, buy Audi and Mercedes cars and finance family holidays, but defence lawyer, Graham Brown, explained: 'The holidays they were taking were purely family holidays. These were not hiring some plutocrat's yacht.'

Sentencing him to a three year prison term, judge Simon Bourne-Arton, QC, told Richards: 'For most of your life, you have been a hard-working, intelligent, law-abiding citizen.

'I am quite satisfied from all that I have read about you and from what I have heard from Mr Brown that you were a man, at that time, suffering from considerable depression.'

Richards was also banned from being a director for 10 years.