Former Almac Group employee Daniel Robinson jailed for £335,000 fraud in the workplace

Ordering Daniel Robinson to serve half that sentence behind bars and half under supervised licence conditions, Judge Richard Greene KC told the 26-year-old thief “this is obviously a serious matter and easily crosses the custody threshold.”

The Craigavon Crown Court judge said while he accepted Robinson had “held his hands up from the start” and had entered a guilty plea at the earlier opportunity, it was also correct that he was “effectively caught red-handed” in his fraudulent behaviour.

Emphasising that he was sentencing on the basis of a loss of £335,000 to the Almac Group rather than the benefit of £94,530 to Robinson, Judge Greene said he had “no doubt that this was a loss to fund a more lavish lifestyle, buy more drugs, visit his girlfriend and buy gifts for unsuspecting family members”.

Last February Robinson, from Castle Rise in Tandragee, entered a guilty plea to the single charge against him of fraud by abusing his position of trust within the Almac Group in that between January 1, 2020 and May 26, 2022 “whilst occupying a position in which you were expected to safeguard or not to act against the financial interests of Almac Group, dishonestly abused that position in that you ordered goods on behalf of Almac Group and appropriated them for your own use or disposal, with the intention, by means of the abuse of that position to make a gain for yourself”.

Summarising the case during his sentencing remarks on Friday, Judge Greene told the court how Robinson had been employed as a material stores technician for Almac since June 2019.

The offences came to light after Ketamine was found in the staff toilets and with Robinson suspected of responsibility, the 26-year-old was suspended and an investigation ensued.

As part of that investigation, the judge said, Robinson’s line manager interrogated his work email account and discovered a number of discrepancies and oddities in that Robinson had been ordering items not usually associated with the Almac Group.

For instance, items which he ordered and then kept for himself or gifted to relatives was a 49” TV, an electric power shower, a Bosch drill, a pressure washed and an Apple MacBook.

To illustrate the method behind the series of fraudulent transactions, Judge Greene took an example of a PC graphics card being ordered by Robinson, an item not carried by Almac but routinely used in computer gaming.

Once such card had been ordered at a cost of £2,000 but Robinson sold it on to CEX for far less than its true value.

Almac’s investigations uncovered that between January 2020 and May 2022, Robinson had ordered around £350,000 worth of items, that he had eight different CEX accounts and within that period, some £94,530 had been lodged into his account either by CEX or in cash.

Judge Greene revealed that Robinson had confessed “he used that benefit to employ a personal trainer, paid for flight to visit his girlfriend in Liverpool” and to buy things for his family.

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Initially, he did not disclose that he was funding a drug habit for fear of his father finding out but it later transpired that he had an £800 per week Ketamine addiction.

The judge told the court there were multiple aggravating features including the breach of trust over and above what is entailed in the offence itself, the length of time over which the frauds were perpetrated and that the cash was used to pay debts and fund a more lavish lifestyle than the defendant could afford.

In mitigation, however, was Robinson’s lack of record, clear and genuine remorse and that he had made “full and frank admissions from the outset”.

As well as imposing the 22-month sentence, Judge Greene ordered that the items Robinson bought for his family be forfeited so that they can be sold at a police auction.