Junior office temp Fiayyiaz Hussain accused of fraud that cost council £150k

A JUNIOR council worker stole nearly £150,000 of public money from the Town Hall after tampering with the payments system, a court heard on Tuesday.
Fiayyiaz Hussain, 29, a temp drafted in to help out in the council’s finance department in 2008, is accused of transferring £146, 287 into a Birmingham-based bank account after tampering with account details.
Mr Hussain denies a fraud charge.
Prosecutor Benedict Kelleher told Blackfriars Crown Court that Mr Hussain switched the account and sort code of DW Bevan, a construction firm, to a bank account unrelated to them.
The council’s auditing department and police found no evidence that the builders had asked for their account details to be changed.
The lump sum, due to be paid out for work carried out on Agar Nursery in Agar Grove, Camden Town, instead went into a Lloyds TSB account and the cash soon disappeared, Mr Kelleher said.
He added that he believed Mr Hussain worked with an accomplice and may not have been the direct beneficiary of the money.
He told the court that Mr Hussain altered the account number and sort code of the building firm three times, each time using his own individual council user-name and password to make the changes.
Mr Kelleher said the account that received the money had initially been set up under a different name, but later unsuccessful attempts were made to change it to the name DW Bevan.
The money has never been recovered, the court heard, and the taxpayer footed the bill when a second payment was sent to the company.
“Inevitably the police and the council would come to Mr Hussain [and] either he would say ‘I did it’ or ‘It wasn’t me’. Somewhat predictably, he has chosen the latter,” Mr Kelleher said.
On September 24, he was “plucked out of the department [and] kicked out of the council,” said barrister John Causer, defending.
Mr Causer told the court his client was innocent of the crime and instead had been set up. He claimed Mr Hussain had stuck a post-it note to his computer that displayed his password, which could have easily been viewed by any of the 50 plus staff working on his floor.
Describing Mr Hussain as a high-flyer who had not been given the support he deserved, Mr Causer said Camden had been “using a racehorse to pull a cart” as they had not known he was training to be a chartered accountant.
The trial continues.
CHARLOTTE CHAMBERS