Woman who stole £900,000 from Charity to Pay Back £1

Chasjit Verma, aged 40, of Goodmayes, London, has been ordered to pay back £1 despite stealing £900,000 from a charity.

She also conned her daughter’s Hornchurch primary school out of £31,000.

Verma was jailed for six years in 2018 while her ex-husband received a 49-week prison sentence, suspended for two years.

She has been told that she will only pay a token amount of £1 after she was declared bankrupt.

Verma defrauded Hacton Primary School Parents’ Association (HSPA) of more than £31,000 while she was out on bail for other fraud offences in 2017.

She was on licence for fleecing her former employer, Jubilee Hall Trust, over a seven-year period. Verma stole more than £900,000 while in charge of the registered charity’s finances.

Verma was found guilty of two counts of fraud in 2016 after she initiated unauthorised payments from her employer’s bank accounts to her own accounts.

She was also found to have fraudulently transferred an additional £20,817.50 from Trust accounts into a NatWest one owned by her husband, Sanjay Verma.

It was revealed that the total amount Verma gained from defrauding the charity was £931,596.02.

In addition to the six-year sentence, Judge Sheelagh Canavan handed a six-month sentence to be served concurrently.

Judge Canavan passed down the sentence and said: “You are a 39-year-old woman who, to all intents and purposes was a perfectly respectable person.

“Closer inspection reveals that this was a veneer over dishonest behaviour by you.”

The pair used the money to live a luxury lifestyle including a £14,000 holiday in Cancun, Michael Buble tickets and a new Mercedes-Benz.

Her bank records also showed that thousands of pounds had been spent on expensive jewellery.

Verma went on to defraud her daughter’s HSPCA of £31,382.68 while on bail for her previous crimes.

As the chairman of the HPSPA for seven years, Verma withdrew the association’s money into her own accounts.

It was under the pretence of making cash and cheque payments to legitimate organisations between February 2016 and February 2017.

HPSPA raises funds to be spent on the school in Hornchurch.

The charity had planned to spend the money on a swimming pool. However, according to prosecutor Deepak Kapur, the plan “had to be put into abeyance”.

Verma was made bankrupt in 2016 and on Tuesday, April 30, 2019, she was ordered to pay a nominal sum of £1 at a confiscation hearing at Southwark Crown Court.

Verma’s defence solicitor disputed the outcome of the confiscation hearing, however, the Recorder confirmed it twice with the courts.