Theft cashier is ordered to repay £20,000 (From York Press)

Aimi Lauren Roberts is ordered to repay £20,000

8:48am Thursday 14th March 2013 in News By Richard Catton, richard.catton@thepress.co.uk

A BANK clerk who stole more than £47,000 from her employer has been ordered to pay compensation of almost £20,000.

Aimi Lauren Roberts, 25, was told at York Crown Court that she has six months to pay £19,525 to the Davygate branch of the Halifax.

Last year she admitted taking banknotes intended to be used in a cash machine, and putting them in her own account.

She was sentenced to 18 months in prison in October and told at the time that she had committed a “grotesque abuse of trust”.

The compensation payable to the Halifax will come from the sale of Roberts’ assets, the court heard.

Roberts, of Woodland Avenue in Leeds, was working at the branch between April and October last year when she stole a total of £47,180. She then covered her tracks by falsifying bank documents.

At the time of her sentencing last year, Recorder Richard Woolfall said: “It was a grotesque abuse of trust placed in you by the bank and you took a substantial amount of money. Only a custodial sentence is appropriate.”

Halifax had promoted Roberts and put her in charge of nine other staff. She had also been responsible, with two other people, for refilling the bank’s automatic cash machines at the branch.

She stole the money over seven months then, when management realised what was happening, allowed two other members of staff to remain under suspicion while she lied that the money in her bank account came from a non-existent inheritance.

As the net closed in, she went on sick leave and then resigned but she was later arrested and interviewed by police, to whom she confessed.

She had stolen £47,180 between April and October last year.