Bournemouth fraudster took £43,000 from friend's business and customers (From Bournemouth Echo)

Bournemouth fraudster took £43,000 from friend's business and customers

3:46pm Monday 15th March 2010 in

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A TRUSTED manager who took more than £43,000 from his best friend’s business and customers was jailed for 12 months.

Father-of-one Barkley Cossins-Price, 35, who worked for his friend Jon Longhurst, had payments from customers transferred directly into his personal bank account.

Cossins-Price of Belvedere Road, Bournemouth, would turn up at the homes of elderly customers sobbing and ask them for money to help him purchase the business J Longhurst Heating & Plumbing Ltd.

The full extent of Cossins-Price’s activities were discovered when he was sacked and Mr Longhurst took a call on Cossins-Price’s work mobile from an irate customer who, it emerged, had paid thousands of pounds into Cossins-Price’s personal account having been told it was the company’s business account.

Cossins-Price and Mr Longhurst had agreed that he would buy the business and he was given a deadline of September 17 to come up with a £20,000 deposit.

His victims included his landlady, Mrs Mason-Brown and 59-year-old Susan Holburt, who lost the £5,200 she had been saving for her retirement.

One victim paid him £2,900 to build a porch despite the fact that it was not the sort of work the company carried out, Bournemouth Crown Court heard.

Cossins-Price pleaded guilty to eight counts of fraud.

The court heard that Cossins-Price had had a heavy gambling habit for the past 12 years, blowing up to £350,000 at the casino.

Paul Hester, defending, said Cossins-Price had been desperate to buy the business but had found himself “out of his depth”.

Cossins-Price also claimed that he had met a man at a cash machine who had offered to front up 60 per cent of the asking price but later disappeared with his money.

Speaking after the sentencing Mr Longhurst said: “We never realised it was going on because the customers were happy.

“He was very cunning and always had a story.”

Mr Longhurst has since started a new company, Jon Longhurst Ltd, which has no connection with Cossins-Price.