Crooked Black Country accountant told to repay £70,000 or go back to jail
A crooked Black Country accountant has been warned she is going back to prison if she does not pay back more than £70,000 in the next three months.
Gail Henshall was jailed for two years eight months in August 2015 for her part in a near £300,000 tax fiddle.
She is now free again, having been released from the sentence on licence and returned to Wolverhampton Crown Court to hear the price she must pay for her involvement in the racket.
Judge Barry Berlin ruled that Henshall, aged 50 and from Willenhall, had personally made £150,000 from the fraud and still had assets worth £71,000 that could be seized.
He ordered her to pay back that amount of money in three months or face a further 18 months in jail.
The cash will come from her share of equity in her matrimonial home – valued at almost £53,500 – a £2,500 Ford Escort and £15,980 from a tax free Isa savings account, revealed Mr Stefan Kolodynski, prosecuting.
He also disclosed that the 'headline figure' of the fraud had been reduced by £42,000 through 'reconciliation' of accounts since the total was initially said to be £296,025.
The mother of two's cafe owner lover Mario Troisi, who laundered money from the fiddle through his bank account, had made £54,000 from the racket, reducing her share of the ill-gotten gains to £200,000.
Mr Kolodynski told the Proceeds of Crime(POCA) hearing: "The POCA officials have been pragmatic in trying to reach a compromise and have reduced the figure by a further £50,000 to £150,000."
Henshall's legal team agreed the new figures for her three year racket and accepted both the amount and the terms of the repayment.
The bookkeeper and tax assessor ran a one-woman business variously called either Hawkeswell Accounts Services and Gail Henshall Accounts Service from her home in Hawkeswell Drive, Willenhall and mainly acted for the self-employed.
She turned to crime by making bogus claims for tax rebates on behalf of scores of clients which she kept to fund a £25,000-a-month gambling habit, the prosecution said.
She submitted false applications using the names of up to 200 of the people on her books, often changing their home address to her own, and pocketed the money after it had been laundered through the bank account of 54-year-old Troisi, who received an identical sentence.
Henshall, who later moved to Hazel Grove, Bilston, pleaded guilty to two charges of fraud in abuse of a position of trust between 2010 and 2014.
