A 59-year-old woman who embezzled £267,000 and almost ruined her employers has been given a five year jail sentence.

Wendy Dillingham was a trusted employee who had control of keeping the books at PPS Media, a firm with offices in Evesham and Stratford dealing with publicity for estate agents.

She joined in 1990 and built her way up to become such a loyal worker that boss Vernon Pethard named her as an executor of his will and trustee of his children's trust fund.

But from 2008 until 2014 she was falsifying accounts, inflating her own wages, putting lump sums into her own account and using the company debit cards to get personal cash, Andrew Baker, prosecuting, told the court.

She spent the money on handbags, home furnishings, clothes and oil paintings, he said.

"If the figures did not match, she forged them," Mr Baker told the court.

She would present Mr Pethard with a regular document detailing the accounts of the company, which at one point had a turnover annually of £22.5 million and 30 employees, but this did not reflect the real position, Mr Baker said.

The offences came to light when part of the company was offered for sale and due diligence by accountants highlighted the discrepancies. Dillingham of Wisteria Drive, Evesham, was confronted and offered to resign. After further investigation, she was charged and initially pleaded not guilty, claiming her boss had authorised all the payments. She later changed her pleas to guilty of theft, fraud and false accounting.

Mr Pethard read a victim impact statement to the sentencing hearing which said it had taken some time to discover the full extent of the fraud.

"It looked so bad the business may have been forced to liquidate," he said.

He said he had worked to build up his business over 30 years and had put in long hours to secure its future and the jobs of staff, which now numbered twelve.

The firm had also suffered costs of around £100,000 in legal fees, staff time and VAT fines because the books were not kept properly.

"I remain deeply shocked and dismayed," he said. "There are things I can never forgive."

Dillingham, the court heard, started on wages of £18,000 which increased to between £30,000 and £35,000. When she got the job, she did not disclose that she had been jailed for six months as a 20-year-old in 1977 for a book-keeping offence when she worked for Barclays Bank.

Frank Dillon, defending, said Dillingham had suffered from depression following her husband's diagnosis with a terminal illness in 2008. He died in 2009 and this coincided with the offences, he said. The firm would not ultimately suffer any losses because Dillingham had enough assets, including her house, to cover confiscation and compensation following a proceeds of crime hearing, due to take place on November 6.

Judge Robert Juckes, QC, said it had been a crude fraud but a skilled and sophisticated cover-up operation.

"Small businesses run entirely on trust and you chose to abuse that trust," he told Dillingham. "What you did brought the company virtually to its knees."

He said Mr Pethard had clearly been angry but had made his statement in a dignified way and had built the business back up with the help of his staff.