Pub boss jailed for stealing £100k from takings
Liam Sanders regularly failed to deposit The Clipper’s full takings at the bank, gradually siphoning off £100,000 over a two-year period, a jury found.
A jury at Woolwich Crown Court sentenced the former general manager of The Clipper in Dartford, Kent, to two and a half years in prison after finding him guilty of ‘fraud by abuse of position’.
The conviction, made on 24 April 2026, follows a tumultuous seven-year journey through the courts.
Liam Sanders, 33, was first rumbled in January 2019 when the pub’s full week’s takings failed to materialise in the bank. After being confronted by directors at the pub’s parent company, MFA Properties, in February 2019, Sanders initially claimed the bank had made a mistake before later confessing to stealing one day’s full takings for four weeks running, amounting to £9,734.84.
Sanders claimed he had taken the cash to help his mother who was in financial difficulty, and vowed to return the full amount he had stolen, which he did by selling his car and taking out a loan.
Lavish holidays
However, a deeper police investigation suggested the pub manager had been siphoning off money from the business for far longer, with the theft going back to 2017. Police identified more than 40 incidents of thousands of pounds not being cashed at the bank, totalling £102,862.45, and arrested Sanders for fraud.
According to local news outfit Kent Online, Sanders spent the cash on lavish holidays to Iceland, Mexico and Amsterdam, worth £10,000, as well as an engagement ring, but the former pub manager denied the second batch of charges, insisting that the money for his holidays had came from a family member.
During a trial, prosecutor Mark Hunsley told the court that Sanders was responsible for paying the cash into the bank and that the “same pattern” of a day’s takings not being taken to the bank had happened for nearly two years.
“Police checked staff rotas and there was no other chance for someone to do this,” he told the Nightingale Court in Maidstone.
Sanders bank accounts also showed “significant” cash purchases to holiday companies.
Manager’s defence
Defence lawyer John Lyons asked MFA Group’s chief executive, Mehdi Afshar, whether there was a written procedure for banking cash. Mr Afshar admitted there were just a few lines in the staff handbook relating to the process, but pointed out that staff, including Sanders, would have received emails from the company about such policy and were given a one-to-one induction before they started their first shift.
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Mr Lyons questioned how, over two years, more than 40 banking slips which should have been checked were not scrutinised.
Afshar said that the person in charge of checking the accounts had been sacked for failing to notice the missing money.
Sentenced at retrial
Following the original week-long trial in 2022, a jury at Nightingale Court failed to reach a decision on whether Sanders had stolen the larger sum of money. The four men and eight women were discharged after being unable to reach a verdict, leading to a retrial at Woolwich Crown Court in March this year.
The second jury found Sanders guilty of stealing £93,127.61, in addition to the earlier admitted theft of £9,734.84.
At the sentencing, the court heard that MFA had suffered “significant” financial loss and the company was only able to survive due to its other businesses being able to “bail The Clipper out”.
Handing out his sentence, Recorder Ward told Sanders: “I accept this was out of character, and you have shown genuine remorse. I do find the remorse genuine and take into account your partial admission and repayment of money”.
However, Ward concluded that there was “an abuse of trust and responsibility” and issued a custodial sentence of two-and-a-half-years in prison, with Sander likely to serve around half of this before being let out on licence.
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