Woman jailed for stealing €271,000 from elderly and vulnerable

A Sligo woman who stole a total €271,000 from the elderly and vulnerable has been jailed for 11 months at Sligo Circuit Court.

Former EBS employee Maeve Diamond (46), of Main Street Ballintogher, Co Sligo targeted the elderly’s life savings in the EBS branch in Grattan Street, Sligo, where she worked as a financial adviser. The defendant has not paid back a penny, the court heard.

The EBS has compensated all the victims.

Her victims said she had abused her position as a financial adviser and a “trusted employee”. When asked where the money went, Diamond said it was spent on “life and her family.”

“It was primarily to spoil the children, they got the best of everything,” she said.

Diamond admitted stealing €271,000 from 10 bank accounts on dates between 2011 and 2016. She also pleaded guilty to 10 counts of making a false instrument, to forge a signature on withdrawal slips from the accounts. A further 63 counts were taken into consideration. In jailing the weeping mother-of-three, Judge Francis Comerford said her crime “was a calculated dishonesty, creating false instruments in a deliberate and sustained dishonesty across a period of time.” The judge said it was a “serious crime of great cunning but not a sophisticated or any way clever crime and it was a self- destructive crime.”

In doing so, she had betrayed her colleagues, her employers and the customers of EBS who had placed their trust in her.

The judge added that he believed that her troubled childhood had led her “into a pattern of criminality, it brought her to a path of dishonesty motivated primarily by an almost compulsive need to get benefits for her children.”

When her crimes were discovered, Diamond left her work and admitted her crime to gardaí. She told gardaí she was “flabbergasted” when told of the amount she had stolen and had “nothing to show for it.”

Diamond, who suffers from fybro-mialgia, told Judge Francis Comerford she and her husband drove old cars, did not go on fancy holidays and she probably spent the money on spoiling her children.

Judge Comerford said he accepted that the money was not used to buy assets or salted away. It was a “deluded” crime.

In addition to her 11 months sentence, Diamond was ordered to enter into a bond of €100 to keep the peace for two years on her release. She was given an 11-month concurrent sentence on the charge of making a false instrument. The judge said she “had strayed from the path but could come back to it.” He said he accepted Diamond was not able to make restitution.