£118,000 in company account of benefit fraudster

But in sentencing Marie Claire Langlois to a one-year suspended sentence and 150 hours of community service, Judge Gary Perry made it clear that she would have received an immediate custodial sentence were it not for the information he had seen about the family.

Langlois and her husband had been placed on income support in 2019 when the States’ rent rebate scheme ended.

The defendant had handled all of the paperwork and provided documents to Social Security in support of the claim.

Advocate Jenny McVeigh, prosecuting, said that Langlois had said repeatedly that they had no additional work outside of that known to the department, but all the while they were running a gardening rubbish collection firm.

Langlois had handled the firm’s invoices, but had not disclosed the company’s income to Social Security.

The existence of their business came to light when a member of Social Security staff saw a sign promoting it.

An investigation led to the firm’s bank account being discovered and examined. At that time it had £118,778 in it.

In total, £64,935 had been overpaid by Social Security. Langlois had already started paying it back but the advocate could not say how long this was likely to take.

The defendant had previous convictions for unrelated offences, including one which had led to a short prison sentence in 2007.

Langlois, 39, of 13, Clairval Estate, St Peter Port, admitted four counts of failing to tell the department that she had received other income from January 2019 to December 2022.

She was represented by Advocate Sam Maindonald, who said that the money made by Langlois was not used to fund a luxury lifestyle.

Her husband was dyslexic and so relied on his wife to deal with all the paperwork and administrative jobs.

The business was started because the family was in financial straits, and the money made was used to keep them out of debt.

While the amount in the bank might have seemed a lot, it had also been used to pay the company’s bills.

Judge Gary Perry said that Langlois had stolen money from the public purse.

‘Your behaviour not only affects the government’s ability to fund benefits, it also feeds into the frenzy of people that think that many benefit claimants are benefit cheats,’ he said.

Langlois was ‘a benefit cheat’ and her actions made others on benefits a target for abuse, he said.

He said he had read the probation report, letters from the school where some of Langlois’ children went, and a psychiatrist’s report, along with a large amount of confidential information about her family which he could not divulge in open court.

‘It may look to some that you have got off lightly but that would be without the knowledge of the material I have read,’ he said.

He sentenced Langlois to four months in prison, consecutive, suspended for three years, on three of the charges.

Because he was of the view that a suspended sentence did not repay the debt Langlois owed to the community, in relation to the fourth offence he imposed the community service order as a direct alternative to four months’ prison.