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Thieving Bride Jailed After Lavish Wedding

Thieving Bride Jailed After Lavish Wedding

A bride who stole money from her employer to help pay for a lavish wedding celebration has been jailed for 20 months.

Kirsty Lane fraudulently siphoned £168,000 from the company where she worked, but her boss Peter Sutton was a guest at the wedding and his suspicions were raised by the sumptuous nature of the event.

Lane, 29, married Graham in January last year at the Tudor-built Great Hall at Mains hotel near Blackpool.

She laid on a fireworks display, magician, two bands, harpist, saxophonist, a DJ, free bar, face painting and feathered masks.

Managing director Mr Sutton said: "We were greeted with flowers and champagne, entertainers, cellists and just a magnificent setting. The sheer scale of it was staggering."

But when Mr Sutton returned to the office where the newly-wed bride worked as a part-time accounts clerk he discovered that she had falsified invoices.

Instead of paying suppliers to the audio-visual firm in Leyland, Lancashire, she had diverted money into her own account.

She even bought bridesmaids dresses courtesy of the company and a jewel encrusted iPad case for £1,500.

Mr Sutton said her "unbridled greed" almost ruined the firm.

"We employ 22 people. The greed that Kirsty Lane showed jeopardised the livelihoods of these people."

He added: "It was the wedding that first started to raise alarm bells. Up to that point we had no idea. She was always claiming poverty and didn't do anything that would tip us off."

The former bride, who cried throughout Wednesday's hearing, had admitted 122 counts of fraud at the company Pure AV.

She was arrested at home and was unable to go on honeymoon to Mexico.