Fraudster led a luxurious lifestyle

A CROOKED finance chief is facing years behind bars after “milking millions” to live a life of luxury.

Sharon Bridgewater, who hid her criminal past to get the job, blew £90,000 (€128,440) on an entertainment system and similar amounts on luxury holidays and expensive furniture.

Her £100,000 kitchen featured in a glossy magazine write-up as one the best 25 in the country.

As her employers struggled to keep the company going — unaware why, in the face of her lies, it continued to haemorrhage money — she squandered another £100,000 on her lover’s birthday.

One of his presents — an £80,000 Ferrari Spider — was among a number of luxury supercars parked in the couple’s driveway.

London’s Southwark Crown Court heard their “jaw-dropping” collection featured a top-of-the range BMW and six Porsches, including a 50-year-old classic Speedster.

Further five-figure sums went on a luxury villa in Spain and a buy-to-let property empire in Britain.

Dinner at top restaurants, including Gordon Ramsay’s at Claridges, cost up to £2,200, with £500 bottles of wine “drunk like water”.

Jurors heard the company director’s many thefts usually saw money transferred to a dormant company she had set up years earlier and used in a previous fraud.

Having siphoned off £2 million from marketing company Hicklin Slade & Partners, and realising discovery might not be far away if she continued, she handed in her notice and got another job.

But within weeks, the “greedy” 36-year-old — described in court as a “lapsed accountancy student” — decided honesty was not for her.

Setting up an internet banking facility, she started milking small West End radio recording company Universal Sound Principles out of a total of £55,000.

Anthony Bate, prosecuting, said her life of crimefinally hit the buffers after Bloomsbury-based firm Hicklin Slade, her biggest victim, finally turned to outside auditors for help.

Bridgewater, who was living in Sudbury, Suffolk, before moving to Lomond Close, Basingstoke, Hampshire, pleaded guilty to 16 counts of theft between August 1999 and May 2005.

She also admitted two charges of furnishing false information and one of perverting the course of justice by attempting to hide assets, following a High Court freezing order after her arrest.