A 32-year-old Abergavenny woman stole more than £100,000 from her employers to pay for holidays, expensive clothes and drugs, Newport Crown Court heard last week.

Michelle Suzanne Ricketts of Merthyr Road was sentenced to 22 months in prison after pleading guilty to 14 fraud-related charges (four counts of theft, two of making false representations, one of fraud by abuse of position, one of attempted theft and six of false accounting).

She also admitted an additional charge of failing to surrender to bail.

Mr Nuhu Gobir, prosecuting, said the offences took place when Ricketts was working for Monmouth water treatment company Siltbuster.

Initially she had been taken on as a receptionist but became fleet hire co-ordinator with access to the company's accounting system and details of company credit cards held by managing director Richard Coulton, financial director Sue Box and business director George Anderson

Suspicions were initially aroused when another company wrote to Siltbuster in June 2011 to say their April invoice had not been paid.

On investigation, Sue Box discovered that £10,018 had been paid into Ricketts' personal bank account.

Further checks revealed that the details of other invoices had been changed and money redirected to the defendant's account.

Ms Box also found four bogus transactions on her credit card between January and April 2011 totalling £2,148. But it turned out that this was just 'the tip of the iceberg'.

Fifty-three more bogus transactions had been made on the credit cards of the three company directors - 33 on her own, eleven on Richard Coulton's and nine on George Anderson's.

Further substantial sums of money had gone into Ricketts' account via altered and false invoices.

In total, from March 2009 to June 2011, Ricketts stole £106,735 and attempted to steal a further £4,411 from Siltbuster in order to maintain 'an extravagant lifestyle'.

Mr Gobir said the falsified invoices and fake credit card transfers enabled her to pay for a holiday for her and a friend, another holiday in Tenerife for her and her partner, luxury items of clothing, a Sky TV subscription, an open study course and drugs including cocaine and ecstasy.

Miss Cerys Beresford-Evans, defending, said that Ricketts' had initially intended to pay the money back.

She said the defendant came from a close, loving family, all hard-working and well-educated, including Ricketts herself.

Ricketts had been ashamed to tell them about what she had done and her failure to surrender to bail was due to a suicide attempt .

She now accepted that she had a drug and alcohol problem and had addressed this.

Probation officer Emma Phillips told the court, that Ricketts had become involved in a volatile relationship where she was abused and controlled by her partner – who relied heavily on her financially, expecting her to keep up a certain standard of living.

She was also introduced to drugs and was 'using' on a daily basis by the time of her arrest.

She had since successfully completed a detox programme and now wanted to help others to overcome their drug problems.

Judge Morris said he accepted that Ricketts had shown genuine remorse and that she had committed the offences and was led into drug dependency under the influence of another person.

But he also noted that, while involved in an earlier relationship, she had been convicted of like offences against an employer, for which she had received a community service order.

"There seems to be a pattern in your life, when things get difficult financially or emotionally, of stealing other people's monies," he said.

He imposed 15 separate sentences to run concurrently, the longest for 22 months.