Worker stole nearly £500,000 of council funds to pay for lavish wedding

A finance officer in one of London’s poorest boroughs has been jailed after she defrauded the council of almost £500,000, paying for a lavish wedding, a honeymoon in Dubai and extensive home renovations.

Ceyda Elkatme, 34, channelled £446,073.23 from London’s Haringey council and into the accounts of friends and family as she processed payments to carers for disabled adults or those with learning disabilities, Southwark crown court heard.

Elkatme and her husband spent some of the money on a extravagant wedding at the Marriott hotel in London’s Grosvenor Square, with the bride wearing an intricate lace veil and jewelled tiara. The ceremony at the five-star Mayfair hotel featured huge floral centrepieces of white roses and lilies, a six-tiered ivory wedding cake and an illuminated tree.

Thousands were also spent on a honeymoon in Dubai, as well as paying off the couples’ mortgage and renovating and extending their four-bedroom home in Waltham Cross.

Jailing Elkatme for three years and six months, the judge, Recorder Benedict Kelleher, said: “Your offence was disgraceful and prolonged fraud, aggravated by the fact it was a gross abuse of your position of trust in which you had been placed.

“It was your scheme and it was conducted over a sustained period of time because you were so grossly abusing the position of trust the council had entrusted to you. You have spent all the money you stole, so I understand there is nothing to pay back.”

“She deceived her managers into approving fraudulent payments,” prosecutor James Norman told the court at the plea and case management hearing before the sentencing. “She entered the names of the other defendants on the system and submitted forms for each of the defendants, ensuring they could be paid by the borough.

“She then made sure they were paid large sums by the London borough of Haringey who thought they were carers for vulnerable adults.”

Texts and emails from Elkatame’s husband, Jihad, 34, showed he had actively recruited new people into the scam and arranged for the cash to be channelled back to his wife. He was jailed for 21 months.

“You must have been fully aware of what she was doing and you assisted her in managing the laundered money,” Khelleher said.

Within five months of being recruited in 2009, Elkatme had put relatives and friends as “carers” in the payment system, who were then paid large sums of money by the council. In total, 66 payments were made to family and friends’ accounts.

Elkatme pleaded guilty to one count of fraud by abuse of position, while her husband and other associates Tijen Kacakoglu, 35, Ajda Saykin-Bezci, 40 and Nikos Kolas, 34, admitted one count of money laundering in November 2014 at a pleas and case management hearing.

Kacakoglu, who was the first person to help Elkatme defraud the council, was sentenced to 12 months in prison, weeping in the dock as the judge told her that her role was “significant, although you may have done relatively little, what you did was central to the offence of money laundering.”

“If you had not provided your accounts this would not have worked; you knew full well this money was coming from a fraud,” he said.

Saykin-Bezci was handed a 12-month sentence suspended for two years and 250 hours of unpaid work as Khelleher acknowledged she had admitted her wrongdoing as soon as she was arrested, and had been saving to try to pay her sum of the cash back.

Three other co-defendents, Abid Fostok, 33, Mazar Khan, 35, and Iqbal Bablu, 27, were convicted after trial this summer. Fostok was jailed for 10 months as he recruited two other defendants to take part in the fraud.

Both Khan and Bablu were handed 12 months imprisonment suspended for two years and 200 hours unpaid work, and Kolas received an eight-month suspended sentence.