A kitchen sales businessman from Grimsby will spend the next few years in jail for faking several invoices and documents as part of a £114,000 insurance scam.
Clive Thomas Wade, 55, received on June 24 a three-year imprisonment sentence from the Grimsby Crown Court, which found him guilty of fraud by false representation following a four-day trial.
Wade, who hails from Ulceby, North Lincolnshire, took out a business insurance policy with
NFU Mutual in December 2010 for his kitchen sales venture.
Wade made an insurance claim for his flooded and damaged display kitchens. He also reported loss of earning since the area had to be closed and renovated.
In July 2011, NFU Mutual initially paid £50,000 to Wade and asked him to provide original invoices for the damaged display units that were supposedly from a local supplier.
In February 2012, the insurer made an interim payment of £10,000 with a final settlement offer of £60,000.
Wade rejected the settlement offer and claimed that his total losses were in excess of £100,000, excluding estimates for loss of earnings.
It was only in August 2013 when Wade provided documents including invoices and receipts for the various damaged display items.
However, NFU Mutual discovered that the invoices were fakes when it contacted the suppliers. The insurer also learned that one company had sold items to Wade, but they were only worth £800 and not thousands as Wade had claimed.
Police officers later found the original documents that Wade had altered to create the fake invoices. Copies of other false documents in the process of being altered were also discovered.
“With the weight of evidence we had it was clear that Wade deliberately set out to defraud NFU Mutual for tens of thousands of pounds,” said detective constable Aman Taylor of the City of London Police insurance fraud department.
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