Toys R Us accountant ordered to pay back £3.4m after escort girl fraud

An accountant who secretly siphoned off almost £3.7 million from the children’s retailer Toys R Us to buy homes and luxury cars for a group of escort girls has been ordered to pay the money back or face an extra decade in prison. To colleagues at the company’s British headquarters in Maidenhead, Berks, where had worked for almost a quarter of a century, Paul Hopes was simply the quiet, greying account manager widely known as “Paul from finance”. He lived in an unremarkable 1960s semi in Woodley on the outskirts of Reading with his wife and two children and drove an ageing Vauxhall.

But for years, he maintained an extravagant double life involving high-class prostitutes, cocaine and five-star hotels during spells away on business. Described in court as a “Walter Mitty character”, he lived out his fantasies by buying sports cars including a Bentley, houses and even an estate in Nigeria for his secret mistresses. When an investigation finally uncovered his fraud, he initially claimed he had given the money to a “special friend” he met at a massage parlour in Reading. But he changed his plea to guilty as he was due to go on trial last year facing a string of charges of theft and money laundering. He was jailed for seven years.



Yesterday a judge at Reading Crown Court ordered him to repay £3.36 million of the £3.68 million he took under the Proceeds of Crime Act as police fraud investigators attempted to trace the funds. If he fails to repay the money, he see his sentence more than doubled with an extra 10 years in prison. The court heard that Hopes, an “accounts payable manager” at the retailer, diverted regular instalments of £300,000 to an account of a fictitious toy manufacturer which he controlled.

He named the fund Dunbar Associates after a prostitute with whom he had become besotted and to whom he eventually handed a total of more than £1.5 million pounds. He spent at least £2.4 million of the money he stole on five female escorts in all. They they bought two properties outright worth over £700,000, a string of expensive cars including a Bentley Continental Flying Spur, a Lexus RX400h, Toyota Land Cruiser and a BMW M3 convertible, as well as designer clothes and jewellery. One even bought a small estate in Nigeria covering more than 2 square miles.