Over a period of six years, Dundee City Council IT worker Mark Conway was able to steal more than £1 million from the cash-strapped local authority.
Just over £7,000 of that money has, so far, been recovered and the council’s insurers are still considering the claim.
Conway, who was jailed for five years and four months after admitting his guilt at the High Court in Glasgow, claimed he began embezzling the funds because he had run up debts on gambling websites.
He had found a loophole that allowed him to send money to his own bank accounts rather than those of suppliers.
Conway, who was the council’s top financial IT worker, kept gambling in the hope he would win big enough to be able to repay his debts.
It’s a sorry story and it is possible to have a soupçon of sympathy for Conway who, like Father Ted trying to knock a tiny dent out of a car, just kept making the problem worse and worse.
Rather than a knackered Rover 213, however, Conway has thrown his life on the scrapheap.
He not only faces spending the next few years behind bars, he has forfeited most of his pension and lump sum – more than £250,000 – in order to repay his debt to the council.
He will also have to sell his home and give the proceeds, an estimated £49,000, to the council.
When Conway does get released he will be both penniless and unemployable.
But how he managed to steal from under the noses of council bosses for such a long period of time remains a mystery – and will do for some time.
The council has said measures have been put in place to prevent a repeat of any similar fraud but it will be November before councillors are given any details of Conway’s scam and how he managed to get away with it for so long.
And it will be December before the public get to learn those details when a report is presented to the scrutiny committee.
This paper asked a raft of questions of the council when Conway was convicted, including what retrospective measures had been put in place, and was told more information would be given upon sentencing.
But they were no more forthcoming at that time either.
Given the scale of the fraud involved – and the assurances already given by the council that there can be no repeat – Dundee and its elected representative deserve an explanation sooner rather than later about what went wrong and why officers are confident it cannot happen again.
