A company executive who embezzled £1 million from his employer to fund a champagne lifestyle of designer clothes, limousines and expensive holidays has been jailed for five years.

Brian Stevenson, 47, lived the life of a lottery winner, spending £15,000 on lingerie, £40,000 taking his family on holiday to California and £15,000 on a day out at a football match.

Over four years he used his employer’s credit card to stay at some of the world’s finest hotels and shopped in boutiques in Beverly Hills and London.

He bought a £1,400 chandelier for his daughter’s bedroom and sent her to school every day in a chauffeur-driven limousine. On one occasion he flew his friends by helicopter from a hotel in the Scottish borders to Edinburgh.

Passing sentence at the High Court in Edinburgh yesterday, Judge Lord Hodge said that Stevenson was guilty of “a long course of dishonesty and deception” against a family who had befriended and trusted him.

Stevenson, who earned £47,000 a year in his job, pleaded guilty last month to embezzling £1 million from James Duncan, his employer, between January 2001 and December 2004. He had access to Mr Duncan’s business and personal finances in his role as director of administration at the Glasgow-based DCS Group.

He was found out only after Mr Duncan tried to use his company credit card to settle a restaurant bill in the summer of 2004 and found that the card was refused.

Stevenson, a rotund, diminutive man, whose wife, Anne, has claimed that she had no idea that their extravagant lifestyle was funded by stolen money, has been pilloried by the Scottish press. The day after pleading guilty, the Daily Record mocked him with the headline: “He’s small, he’s round, he nicked a million pound”.

The court heard that Stevenson, of Partick, Glasgow, was taken on by DCS, a family-run waste management company, as a favour to his father, who was an old customer. He became a close friend of Mr Duncan, impressing him with his apparent diligence. However, Vinit Khurana, for the prosecution, said that this appeared to count for nothing. He told the court: “Stevenson lavished designer goods, clothing and jewellery on himself and his family.”

The court was told that Stevenson’s motivation remained a mystery, although it emerged yesterday that he was given a six-year jail sentence in 1985 for defrauding life assurance clients of £200,000.

Mr Duncan, 58, has spoken of his “sorrow” over the deception. “I wanted to help this man and I gave him my trust, but he betrayed it,” he said.

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