Britain's Serious Fraud Office announced this week the conviction of a group accountant in the culmination of its fraud conspiracy case against executives of software firm Torex Retail plc.

Mark Gavin Woodbridge, 42, was convicted of two counts of conspiracy to defraud and one count of false accounting. Woodbridge was sentenced in Oxford Crown Court to three years and ten months' imprisonment. Woodbridge, who served as group financial accountant for the Torex Retail Group of Companies, was ordered to pay costs of £170,000 within 12 months, and has been disqualified from acting as a company director for three years.

Torex Retail sold software used for touch-screen tills. It was formed in 2004, and listed on the Alternative Investment Market of the London Stock Exchange. Trading was suspended for the company in January of 2007, and the company went into administration in June of that year. The offenses took place between May 2006 and January 2007.

Two others executives, including the company's former CEO, pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy to defraud before going to trial. Christopher Edward Moore, 58, was named the company's chief executive officer in February 2005, and became executive chairman in September 2005. Moore stepped down as CEO in September 2006, but remained the company's chairman.

Robert William Loosemore, 47, was executive chairman of Torex until September 2005, and then served as a consultant to the company and was a major shareholder.

Moore and Loosemore were sentenced in January, but their sentences were not disclosed by the SFO until this week. Moore will serve 30 months imprisonment for each count, to be served concurrently. He was ordered to pay £100,000 in prosecution costs and disqualified as a director for one year. Loosemore was sentenced to 20 months imprisonment for each count, to be served concurrently. He was ordered to pay £50,000 in court costs and disqualified as a director for one year.

Moore, Loosemore, and Woodbridge were charged with conspiring to defraud Torex shareholders between May and August of 2006, by falsely inflating by £6.5 million the cash at bank/revenue figures in the company's interim results, published Aug. 14, 2006. According to SFO prosecutors, the defendants created false documents to justify the entries __ a £5 million false distribution agreement between Torex and Loosemore's private company, Magdalen Consulting Ltd., and a phony £1.5 million “Goodwill Deposit” agreement between Torex and Loosemore.

Additionally, Woodbridge was found guilty of, and Moore and Loosemore pleaded guilty to, conspiring between November 2006 and January 2007, by creating another false deal between Torex and Magdalen Consulting, purporting to vary the original false distribution agreement in order to sustain the original fraud.

Woodbridge was found guilty of one count of false accounting for causing an additional £2 million in revenue to be falsely recognized in the company's interim financial statement, between May and August of 2006. He was acquitted of two other counts.

A fourth Torex executive – 59-year-old Nigel David Horn – was charged in the case. The jury could not reach a verdict on the charge against Horn, who served as Torex's legal director and company secretary, and the judge directed he be acquitted.

The SFO began working on the case in January of 2007, with charges filed in 2011. The trial for Horn and Woodbridge began in March of this year.

In a related investigation, two directors of a Torex subsidiary called XN Checkout Ltd. were convicted in 2011 for conspiracy to defraud Torex shareholders by causing false profits to be entered in published 2005 year-end accounts and 2006 interim accounts. Those directors, Edwin Dayan and Christopher Ford, attributed the false profits to a fictitious agreement with pub chain Mitchells & Butler. Dayan also served as a director of Torex Retail.

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