A company director and former House of Keys candidate has been jailed after appeal judges ruled his suspended sentence was too lenient.

Richard Ian Kissack, a qualified accountant and owner of Ambitions recruitment agency, had admitted VAT fraud totalling £190,000 and was sentenced to 22 months, suspended for two years, in May this year.

This sentence undermined public confidence in the justice system, according to the Attorney General, who launched an appeal.

Kissack, 52, had admitted nine specimen charges relating to 27 falsified VAT returns. He’s now been sentenced to immediate custody for 13 months on the first charge, and six months on each subsequent charge, to run concurrently.

Delivering judgment, Jeremy Storey QC and Deemster Alistair Montgomerie said the sentence handed down by Deemster Graeme Cook was ’flawed because he took into account irrelevant factors and failed to have regard to the need to impose a deterrent sentence.

’The loss of employment by the defendant’s wife and 2.5 other employees and/or an ability to repay the VAT by the defendant continuing to work are not proper reasons for keeping the defendant out of prison.’

They added that there would be serious questions over Ambition’s future even with the defendant, as the business would be ’tainted’, so the employees could be out of work in any event, and that Kissack’s family would be just as likely to lose their current home to pay back the VAT if Kissack remained free.

After Ambitions had been notified of a VAT inspection, Kissack wrote to Customs and Excise accepting ’historical errors’ had been made in 27 VAT returns, resulting in underpayments of £190,536. He said he intended to repay the VAT when business picked up.

The appeal judges agreed with Deemster Cook’s view that the entries were not errors at all but deliberate falsifications. Kissack said his reason for withholding VAT received from the business’s customers was ’to look after my family’.

Pleading for a lesser sentence before Deemster Cook, Kissack’s advocate said there was no abuse of position of power, trust or responsibility and nothing sophisticated about the ’shabby and inevitably detectable fraud ... an accident waiting to happen’.

However, Deemster Cook said he did not fully accept the defendant’s claimed historic intention to repay the VAT.

Kissack had not paid anything for eight years and was content for the debt to build up to about £250,000 before addressing the problem. However, Deemster Cook determined that as he was not required by any precedent to impose a deterrent sentence of immediate custody he was not going to do so. He said employees might lose their jobs, and Kissack’s family could be left floundering.

At appeal, James Robinson for the Attorney General said the 22 months’ sentence by Deemster Cook was not unduly lenient but the decision to suspend it was, stating there would be ’a genuine sense of public grievance’.

He said there had been an abuse of position of power, trust and responsibility, the defendant’s ’many dishonest statements to conceal the true facts and the victim being the public purse’, a suspended sentence was ’wholly inappropriate’.

Kissack’s advocate Andrew Baker said that it was not a case of abuse or power, trust or responsibility but ’the offences were no more than under-declarations of income received’. It was not a sophisticated fraud and there was no ’cover up’.

The appeal judges decided in favour of the Attorney General, stating: ’In our judgment, the decision to suspend was unduly lenient because there was no good reason to suspend having regard to all the relevant circumstances of the offence, the offender and the background situation.

’We agree with Mr Robinson that a suspended sentence would undermine public confidence in the justice system and does not meet the justice of the case.’

The judges said that distress and anxiety could result when a defendant is jailed on appeal after receiving a suspended sentence, but added that Kissack’s advocate would have made him aware of the risk of an appeal on the day of his sentence, and ’uncertainty has prevailed for only 12 weeks’.