Postal worker denies theft charges - stock photo

A POSTAL worker was accused of theft after £900 which had been planted in a test package by suspicious Royal Mail staff went missing, a court has heard.

The package, containing £975, was taken to the special delivery area at the Ipswich sorting office where Julian Green was working, after it was noticed that some special delivery items had gone missing, Ipswich Crown Court was told.

After the envelope containing the money was left with Green he allegedly took it to a walk-in safe and when he came out it appeared the envelope had been tampered with, Adrian Chaplin, prosecuting, said.

When the envelope was examined by investigators who had been covertly monitoring the special delivery area the £975 was missing and it had never been recovered, Mr Chaplin said.

“The prosecution can’t say what Green did with those notes,” said Mr Chaplin.

Green, of Prittlewell Close, Ipswich, has denied stealing £975 from the Royal Mail on August 12, 2010, and converting criminal property in 2009.

Mr Chaplin said that when Green was interviewed about the missing £975 he accepted that as the envelope did not have an Ipswich postcode he would normally have put it in a special area for “mis-sorted post” and could not explain why he had not.

He was also unable to explain why he had taken the envelope containing the money into the walk-in safe.

Mr Chaplin said the converting criminal property charge related to 24,100 Mauritian rupees worth between £472 and £500 which had been sent by special delivery to a customer but had never been received by her.

The package containing the foreign money was shown as coming into the Ipswich sorting office on September 16 2009 and was also recorded on an internal system as being delivered even though it was not.

It was later discovered that 24,100 Mauritian rupees had been paid into a bank account in the name of Green’s father which was an account for which Green had a power of attorney, said Mr Collins.

He alleged it wasn’t a coincidence that the exact amount of money that had gone missing from the special delivery package had been paid into Green’s father’s bank account.

The trial which is expected to last the rest of this week continues.