A married couple stole £150,000 from a celebrity chef’s restaurant and used some of the money to pay for family holidays abroad, a court has heard.

Nicola Nightingale, 48, and Simon Nightingale, 50, took the money from Great British Menu chef Stephen Terry while working at his restaurant in Monmouthshire.

Mr Terry, who was best man at Gordon Ramsay’s wedding, opened his award-winning gastropub The Hardwick in Abergavenny in 2005.

The couple were given two-year suspended sentences at Cardiff Crown Court on Monday and were ordered to carry out 100 hours of unpaid work.

Mrs Nightingale pleaded guilty to fraud and Mr Nightingale was convicted of possession of criminal property.

During the hearing, the court heard that Mrs Nightingale had been employed as Mr Terry’s office administrator between February 2018 and March 2020 and that she had used the money to fund a spending addiction.

Over a two-year period, she transferred almost £47,000 into her husband’s bank account, made payments of more than £50,000 into her account, increased her wages by £6,000 and made additional payments to herself disguised as paid wages of £47,000.

The total amount stolen from the restaurant was £150,234.63 and during a trial in February it was revealed that some of the money was spent on foreign holidays.

‘Significant debt’

Prosecuting, Tom Roberts said Mrs Nightingale had run the business into “significant debt”.

“She’d given the impression that the business was running smoothly but she had in fact run it into significant debt by extracting money from it for herself,” he said.

A victim impact statement written in June 2020 was read to the court in which Mr Terry said he may not have been aware of the fraud “had it not been for the unprecedented pandemic”.

“Over the past 15 years I’ve worked extremely hard to build a successful business in the heartland and throughout this time I’ve worked well with suppliers and built strong working relationships,” he said.

“The impact of being defrauded of such a significant amount of money and having large outstanding payments to my suppliers is potentially devastating. There’s no doubt damage to my reputation and working relationships.

“Had it not been for the unprecedented pandemic, that is COVID-19, I’m not certain that I would have been aware of the fraud. And I believe that the business would not have survived this financial loss.”

‘Haunted’

Susan Ferrier, Mrs Nightingale’s defence lawyer, said her client had an “extreme problem with alcoholism and mental health” and that those problems had contributed to an addiction to buying things as a means of coping.

Ms Ferrier added that Mrs Nightingale “bitterly regretted” the amount she had stolen and is “haunted” by the impact of her actions.

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Martin Taylor led Mr Nightingale’s defence who argued the defendant accepted his “negligence” and had “massive regret” for allowing the situation to happen.

Handing down the suspended sentences, Record Judge Barry Clarke said that sending the defendants to prison would have had a “lasting, negative impact on them [their children] and upon their development”.

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