A LOANS company manager has been jailed for stealing more than £165,000 by inventing the names of borrowers.

Margaret Roxby, 33, who ran the office of Welcome Finance in Norton High Street, Stockton, was sentenced at Teesside Crown Court yesterday.

A jury convicted her last month of 72 charges of false accounting and using a false instrument.

Roxby, of Oakfield Crescent, Durham City, was jailed for two-and-a-half years, and the judge made an order confiscating £25,387 of her assets or she will face an extra 18 months in jail.

She stole thousands of pounds over four years between September 2000 and August 2004 and spent it on high-living, with exotic holidays and a Peugeot convertible car, said Simon Phillips, prosecuting.

She tricked the company out of £165,458, but used some of it to repay the loans. Prosecutors said that her actual benefit was about £71,000.

She obtained the money by opening 36 fraudulent loan accounts for non-existent people with fictitious addresses and cashing 40 cheques.

Mr Phillips also said she manipulated entries in the company's electronic diary system to show that other staff members were working on the accounts and visiting the phantom customers.

Even after her conviction she still maintained she was innocent, said Judge John Walford, who added that it was troubling and puzzling.

The judge said that the evidence against her was overwhelming, and her criminal activities over the years had had an effect on her employees.

At a previous hearing, Judge Walford said: "It's a great pity that you lacked the moral courage and good sense to admit what you had done."

Peter Walsh, defending, said that prison would be a heavy blow for someone of her age, position and lack of previous convictions.

The judge told her that there had to be an immediate prison sentence to reflect the seriousness of such offending and to deter others.

Roxby, who has been in jail since her conviction last month, smiled when the sentence was announced and she nodded to people in the public gallery.