Former district councillor Jo Currie has been jailed for 12 months after pocketing £30,000 from his local church.

Currie, 53, siphoned off cash more than 100 times to pay household bills when he ran into money trouble between June 1994 and March 1997.

Oxford Crown Court heard yesterday how Currie stole the cash when he was treasurer of the parochial church council at St James Church, Somerton, near Bicester.

Prosecutor Nicholas Syfret said Currie, formerly of Church Street, Somerton, abused his position by pocketing cash raised from private covenants, events such as fetes and from the church collection plate.

He also wrote cheques on behalf of the PCC and deposited money in a bank account belonging to British Heritage Hotels, a company he set upJailed for theft of church cash in 1992. Although the firm never got off the ground, Currie paid church money in and then withdrew it. He also wrote cheques to settle private electricity and telephone bills.

Mr Syfret said: "The prosecution cannot say how many individual thefts there were but they certainly numbered more than 100."

When Currie presented church accounts at annual meetings, he made up figures to hide his theft. In 1996 he even told fellow PCC members the church would be bankrupt if it did not stop spending so much.

Adrian Redgrave, defending, said Currie had repaid the money, plus interest, and had written to the church to apologise. He said Currie stole the cash because he was in severe financial trouble. Currie was a marketing consultant and once held a senior management post with Rank Xerox. In 1975 he suffered two epileptic fits and lost his job within a year.

Since then, he had failed to get another job and several business ventures had failed. He moved to Oxfordshire in 1992 and later became PCC treasurer and Cherwell district councillor for Heyford.

He resigned from the district council last month.

Mr Redgrave said: "The treasurer's job was not one that he courted. It is not a responsibility that he really wanted but he was a member of the church and he had been asked to become treasurer and he agreed.

"His financial pressures increased and increased. He shared them with not a soul. He bottled it all up and in the middle of 1994 he started to use church money as a temporary respite from his pressing financial needs.

"When it started it was confidently intended to be a 'one-off' misuse of that money but we now know how far it escalated."

Currie pleaded guilty to 12 counts of theft and three of false accounting.

Judge Anthony King told him: "It is truly a great sadness to see someone of your years, of previous impeccable character and someone who has performed important duties for the public, committing a crime.

"These were carefully executed thefts covered up over a long period of time, involving substantial sums of money."

Currie was guilty of a very substantial breach of trust, the judge said.

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