A GARAGE owner and his partner who committed a series of frauds and tried to pay for stays in plush hotels with counterfeit cash will pay back just £5 each.

David Soulsby earned £83,132 from his criminal misdeeds and Aimee Felton £32,522, a judge at Teesside Crown Court declared.

But because of their limited funds, Judge Howard Crowson could only make a nominal £5 confiscation order in each of their cases – to be paid within 28 days.

The order made under Proceeds of Crime legislation will, however, enable police to seize any assets the pair have should they come into further money.

Soulsby, 37, of Watergate Road, Consett, was jailed for two years at an earlier hearing in April this year, after he admitted defrauding finance companies and using counterfeit cash.

He used a “shell” company, no longer in operation, and a driving licence in someone else’s names to get finance on two cars, a £33,000 Audi and a £25,000 VW Eos. One was later seized by police, the other handed back.

Soulsby, who is serving his sentence in Holme House prison, Stockton, sold a 4x4 Mitsubishi to a customer of his garage, Consett based EW Motors, even though it belonged to a finance company and the payments on it had stopped.

Felton, 36, of Willow Grove, Harrogate, obtained a credit card processing facility for her business, Rapid Recycling Ltd, and tried to use it to process a number of transactions for amounts including £98,00 and £24,500.

She also tried and failed to fraudulently obtain a £79,000 VAT refund for a tyre-shredding machine she falsely claimed the company had bought and admitted fraudulently obtaining a debt ‘factoring’ agreement.

Felton was given a 21 month jail sentence, suspended for two years, after also admitting fraud and using counterfeit notes.

The duo were stopped by police in possession of 240 counterfeit £20 notes after staff at a Hilton hotel, in Cobham, Surrey, where they had stayed, alerted police of their suspicions.

At their sentencing earlier this year Felton was said to have shown “proper remorse”, while Soulsby’s mitigation centred on his financial difficulties and the fact he had been unable to cope with the running of the garage business after his father died.