A bakery manager in Scotland has been found guilty of embezzling almost £3k from Aulds Bakery.

Prosecutors at a hearing in Greenock Sheriff Court said Loughray had been siphoning off the money for a number of months. At the time of the theft, she was reported to be £900 in debt for council tax and rent arrears, as well has having a credit card bill.

According to the Glasgow Evening Times, the court heard that Anne Loughray had exploited Aulds Bakery’s method of banking to steal the money over a six-month period. The paper reported that the court heard the procedure at Aulds was to put takings into paper bags used for selling cakes and pastries to customers, marking the amounts on the outside of the bags. These would then be deposited at a Post Office Girobank.

However, while confirming that the bakery manager had been found guilty and would be sentenced in early September, a spokesperson for Aulds claimed that there were “several errors in the report”, including the company’s suggested method of banking and that the report itself “was not helpful to the company or to any local businesses”.

In her defence, Loughray claimed she had lost £2,995 on one occasion, where she had ‘lost the money’ after putting it into an Aulds carrier bag. However, she could not remember where the loss had occurred or on which day, claiming the cash had vanished sometime between 23 October and 3 November 2014. She also claimed that she had used £1k of her own money to try to cover up losing the takings.

However Sheriff Derek Hamilton dismissed the defence, saying; “It seems to me that if someone lost nearly £3k, then the date would be etched on their memory.”