A chip shop supervisor who was caught pocketing her employer’s cash in a police sting operation avoided a jail sentence yesterday.
Barbara Macrae was told by Sheriff Margaret Neilson that only two sentencing options were open to her – jail or unpaid hours.
The Sheriff decided to impose 200 hours of unpaid work as an alternative to custody and ordered Macrae remain under social work supervision for a year.
Macrae’s original lawyer, Pauline Chapman withdrew from acting for her when Macrae had denied to social workers that she had committed the offence.
Her new lawyer, David Fitzpatrick told the court that he was not seeking to withdraw her guilty plea and Sheriff Neilson replied that she would not permit it.
Mr Fitzpatrick said that his client would co-operate with a community payback order. He said that Macrae had stopped engaging with social workers when sentence had been deferred for their input for three months at an earlier hearing.
Last year, Macrae had gone on to trial denying she was a thief and had embezzled £5,550 from Lorimer’s Family Restaurant on Longman Road in Inverness between May and July last year.
But the 48-year-old, of Mackay Road, changed her plea to guilty of embezzling £956.70 from the business on July 9, the day she went to the bank to deposit three bags of takings.
A sting operation had been set up by police to catch the thief who was suspected by her employers of embezzling thousands of pounds from the restaurant.
After four days of takings had gone missing in the previous two months, Inverness Sheriff Court heard that serial numbers were recorded and the Royal Bank of Scotland was tipped off before Macrae went to the premises to make a deposit.
Her trial heard that she took three days of revenue to the bank but only lodged two days. CCTV cameras were trained on her during her time in the bank.
The court heard that serial numbers were recorded from the notes in the three bags Macrae took to the bank.
