Woman who was part of £1.7m fraud walks free

A woman who was part of a family plot that defrauded a Jewish charity of £1.7m walked free from court yesterday after a judge described her as a "battered wife".

Jacqueline Camp was given a two-year jail sentence, suspended for two years, after Southwark Crown Court was told she was acting on the instructions of her former husband, Mark.

The pair were part of a "culture of fraud" at the United Synagogue, centred on Waltham Abbey and East Ham cemeteries, that caused the cost of burials to treble.

Mark Camp's 29-year-old brother, Andrew, was jailed in February for 18 months for his part in the fraud, which involved authorising invoices from bogus companies, over-ordering supplies and selling the surpluses on the black market. Charges against Mark Camp, 38, and his father Eric, 63, were dismissed last year.

Jacqueline Camp, 42, of Woodford, Essex, admitted conspiracy to defraud, but Judge Christopher Elwyn gave her a suspended sentence after reading confidential pre-sentence and psychiatric reports. The judge justified the suspended sentence because of the "exceptional circumstances", including the effect on her two children if she was jailed. "I am satisfied you were, in effect, a battered wife and you were really put in the position whereby you simply fell in with what your husband wanted to have happen, together with other members of his family," he said.

Camp was charged with obtaining £53,000, much of it by sending invoices for plants and flowers she claimed to have supplied through her florist business, Forget-Me-Not Flowers.

The United Synagogue is an organisation of about 60 synagogues and its burial society administers 1,250 funerals a year.