A crooked Halfords store manager who swindled £90,000 from the retail giant has been ordered to hand back just £1.
Gary Ridgewell was jailed for 30 months after operating a customer coupon scam over a five-year period.
After he was sentenced in September a proceeds of crime action was then raised in order to try to claw back the cash he stole.
But Perth Sheriff Court heard yesterday that lawyers had agreed the fraudster would only have to pay back £1.
His original trial at the same court was told Ridgewell had been hooked on betting since he was aged 13 and he had constantly struggled to fund his addiction.
Jailing him for two-and-a-half years, Sheriff Alison McKay said: ‘You embezzled the sum of £90,000 from your employers over a period of five years.
‘That is a significant breach of trust.’
The court heard Ridgewell – who was originally charged with embezzling £178,000 – had not paid back a penny of the money he had taken.
He was pocketing cash from the tills and then doctoring customer coupons to balance the books while managing Halfords branches in Perth and Dumbarton.
The 51-year-old was caught when the firm launched a nationwide investigation and found suspicious activity at both his stores.
Ridgewell admitted embezzling the reduced sum from the company between January 2013 and March 2018.
Fiscal depute Callum Gordon said Ridgewell discovered an ‘anomaly’ in the procedure for registering customer coupons.
He added: ‘The accused realised that by artificially increasing the value of the coupon, the cash balance would be higher than the physical cash balance in the till.
‘He realised that cash could be removed from the till and the total recorded balance would match the physical balance.’
CCTV taken from the Perth store in March 2018 showed the accused taking money from the till and placing it in his pocket.
Ridgewell, from Doune, Perthshire, was interviewed by bosses and confessed.
Mr Gordon continued: ‘The accused said he had a gambling problem and had used some of the money to support it.’
He was sacked after a disciplinary hearing in March 2018.
David Holmes, defending, said: ‘Mr Ridgewell is someone who, unfortunately, was taken to gambling from the age of 13 and it has been a problem for him through most of his life.’