Mark Woodbridge, the former group financial accountant of software supplier Torex Retail, has been jailed for his part in a fraud where the company's accounts were manipulated to show healthy trading.
Woodbridge was sentenced to three years and 10 months' imprisonment, disqualified from acting as a company director for three years and ordered to pay costs of £170,000 within 12 months.
The trial marks the final stage in a Serious Fraud Office (SFO) fraud conspiracy prosecution against four former executives of Torex Retail, which was involved in the retail software sector for touch-screen tills.
Woodbridge's co-defendant, former Torex company secretary Nigel Horn, was acquitted of the single charge of conspiracy brought against him. Former chairman and chief executive Christopher Moore and Robert Loosemore, who was a former executive chairman and also acted as a consultant to Torex, both pleaded guilty ahead of the trial.
The SFO investigation found that Woodbridge, Moore and Loosemore defrauded the shareholders of the company between May and August 2006 by falsely inflating by £6.5m the cash at bank/revenue figures of the company's interim results which were published on 14 August 2006.
In order to justify these entries the defendants created two false documents: a false distribution agreement worth £5m between the company and Loosemore's private company, Magdalen Consulting Ltd; and a false 'Goodwill Deposit' agreement worth £1.5m between the company and Loosemore.
Woodbridge was also found guilty on an additional charge of conspiring between November 2006 and 26 January 2007 to defraud shareholders by creating a further false agreement between the company and Magdalen Consulting Ltd which purported to vary the original false distribution agreement in order to sustain the original fraud. Horn was acquitted of this offence, the only one he faced.
Woodbridge was also found guilty of false accounting between May and August 2006 when he caused a further sum of £2m revenue to be falsely recognised in the company's interims financial statement.
He was given a sentence of three years, four months for each count of conspiracy to defraud, to run concurrently, and six months for the false accounting to run consecutively.
Moore's sentence is 30 months in jail, payment of £100,000 in costs and disqualification from being a director for one year; Loosemore's is 20 months, £50,000 in costs and a year's disqualification.
In a separate court case which also formed part of the Torex investigation, two directors of a Torex subsidiary company XN Checkout Ltd, Edwin Dayan and Christopher Ford, were convicted in January 2011 of conspiracy to defraud Torex shareholders by causing false profits to be entered in the published 2005 year end accounts and the 2006 interim accounts, attributed to a fabricated agreement with pub chain outlet Mitchells & Butler. Dayan was also a director of Torex Retail plc.
Torex, which started out in 2004, was listed on AIM and went into administration in June 2007 following the suspension of trading in shares of the company on 26 January 2007.
