VAR sales staff embroiled in bogus invoice fiasco

Former staff at two resellers given suspended sentence and community order, respectively, for their part in end-user scam

Two former staff at two separate resellers helped an IT procurement manager to defraud his firm using bogus invoices, according to This is Scunthorpe.

Grimsby Crown Court heard how retail services firm Nisa innocently paid £123,000 in fake or inflated invoices created by its IT procurement manager, Trevor Guerin, the report detailed.

Barry Hesk, formerly a director of Nettitude and Aatish Dudani, formerly of Bytes, were given a suspended prison sentence and 12-month community order, respectively, for their part in the scam, the report said. Both men no longer work for the firms in question.

Guerin, whom the judge labelled as the "driving force" in the conspiracy, was jailed for two years.

According to the prosecution, deals were arranged to inflate the cost of IT equipment, some of which was not supplied. The two resellers – who were not aware of the other's arrangement – paid sums of money into two companies set up by Guerin.

Hesk and Dudani paid Guerin a total of £34,180 and £16,000 respectively through the deals, the prosecution said. Nettitude received a similar amount but had paid it back to Nisa, while Bytes received £39,000, £8,789 of which was paid to Dudani in commission, it was claimed.

One deal involving Hesk was for a Crystal Ball Licence which was invoiced for £18,700 but would normally have cost £700, the prosecution added.

Hesk was given 26 weeks in prison suspended for 12 months and ordered to do 200 hours of unpaid work, the article detailed. Dudani received a 12-month community order and must do 150 hours of unpaid work.

In a statement to ChannelWeb, Rowland Johnson, managing director for Nettitude Limited, said: "Barry Hesk resigned immediately the matter came to light. The company did not benefit in any way from the incident but made sure that Nisa Today's was repaid in full.

"Nettitude has strong integrity and business ethics, and took decisive measures as soon as this one-off incident came to our attention."

In a statement to ChannelWeb, Neil Murphy managing director of Bytes, said: "One of our former sales people has been implicated in a case of fraud perpetrated by a customer who has since been imprisoned. At no point did Bytes or our former employee financially benefit from this incident which was orchestrated by the customer's employee. In the 30 years that Bytes has been trading this is the first time we have been a victim of an incident of this kind and we are pleased that it has now been dealt with by the authorities."