An army officer who defrauded taxpayers out of nearly £200,000 to educate his children at a top private school in Lancashire has been jailed for 12 months.
Lieutenant Colonel Robert Henry Jolleys, 53, claimed the cash to send his three sons to the exclusive £28,000-per-year Roman Catholic Stonyhurst College, near Clitheroe.
Jolleys, who is known as Henry, kept up the elaborate charade by maintaining to his superiors that he was still married and that his wife Judith lived with him in his Army quarters when in fact they had separated.
His ruse was only rumbled when his now ex-wife rang his superior officer in the summer of 2009 and asked “Where’s Henry?”, sparking an investigation.
Jailing him at Swindon Crown Court, Recorder Jeremy Wright told Jolleys he had committed a “serious, substantial fraud” over five years between 2004 and 2009.
“This is not just a case of letting things slip,” the judge said. “On each of these occasions you deliberately ... made declarations to obtain the money you obtained and make the fraud.”
Jolleys sent sons Rupert, 22, Charles, 20, and his youngest, aged 15, to Stonyhurst using the Army’s continuing education allowance (CEA).
This allows service personnel to send children to boarding school to prevent disruption to schooling caused by postings around the UK and abroad. The officer, of Woodlands Park in Whalley, near Clitheroe, used the “eye-watering” sums of money - totalling £188,060 - to provide a privileged education for five years that he could not have otherwise afforded, his trial heard.
The court heard that Jolleys was legitimately claiming the allowance, which pays up to 90% of the school fees, until he separated from his wife.
He was accused of not informing his superiors of the split, meaning he may have no longer have received the allowance. Jolleys was convicted of three charges of obtaining a money transfer by deception, three charges of fraud and one charge of the forgery of his ex-wife’s signature on a bank form, after a trial in January.
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