A Dundee watch repairer is serving time for embezzling £130,000 worth of customers’ watches and jewellery.
Kevin Mitchell, who has two previous convictions for embezzlement and theft, has been jailed for 34 months by Sheriff Ian Anderson at Dundee Sheriff Court after he admitted a total of 32 charges of theft of high-value designer items.
They included a haul of Seiko, Omega, Pulsar, Rolex, Accurist, Cartier and Tissot watches, plus hi-value jewellery, which had been handed in to his shop for repair, service or to sell for the customers.
Mitchell, 50, of Tayport, admitted pawning dozens of his customers’ watches at the Ramsdens shop on High Street, Dundee, to the value of £80,000.
In addition, at his shop in Dundee City Centre, he embezzled dozens of customers possessions, amounting to around £50,000.
Mitchell even targeted FIFA referee Gordon Hunter whose £600, Fifa-inscribed Pulsar watch which had been presented to him after a Uefa Cup match, disappeared without trace.
Sheriff Ian Anderson told Mitchell a custodial sentence was inevitable and said: “You pawned customers property to the value of £80,000 and £50,000 of other property has gone and was never recovered.
“Some of those would be trinkets but others families’ treasures of considerable actual value or sentimental value to the others and for your own selfish purposes deprived these people of their property in what was a persistent course of action.”