A former HMRC employee who stole more than £160,000 from colleagues working at a tax office in Southend via a fraudulent savings club has been jailed for two and a half years.

Ruth Kevan ran a savings scheme which originally started as a Christmas fund but became a general savings scheme offering interest rates as high as 14.5%, far above those offered by banks.

Forty colleagues invested a total of more than £212,000 into the scheme over a five year period, but only £48,000 remained by the time the fraud was discovered, with some individuals losing their retirement savings, wedding funds and in one case a redundancy package.

At Basildon Crown Court Kevan admitted 21 charges of fraud and one of theft. The court heard she had spent most of the money on visits to hotels, holidays and trips to Scotland to watch the Six Nations rugby. The savings club was described as an elaborate Ponzi scheme whereby new investors' cash was used to pay fake interest to existing members. Kevan said that she planned to try and pay back the money when she started receiving her pension in a few years' time.

The scam was eventually discovered when HMRC investigators became suspicious of large sums of money being deposited in Kevan's personal account in April this year. Kevan was dismissed from her position at HMRC for gross misconduct in August 2013.