A disgraced former church minister and banking group boss who acquired the nickname Crystal Methodist has been jailed for three years for stealing money from a friend which he used on drugs, holidays and gifts for himself.
Paul Flowers, 74, had pleaded guilty to 18 fraud charges amounting to £100,000 after abusing his position as the executor of the will and holder of power of attorney for a woman named Margaret Jarvis.
The court heard that Jarvis, who had dementia, had been a friend of Flowers for many years but he had betrayed her trust and plundered her savings. Flowers had been due to be sentenced earlier this month but failed to turn up, and an arrest warrant was issued.
The former Methodist minister, who chaired the Co-operative Bankfrom 2009 to 2013, hit the headlines in 2013 after the Mail on Sunday published secretly filmed footage of him handing over £300 in cash for crystal meth and other drugs in Leeds.
On Thursday, Manchester crown court heard that Jarvis was a teetotal retired teacher, who never married and had no children. Flowers’s public profile helped her to trust him with her affairs, the court heard.
As Jarvis’s dementia progressed and she could no longer look after her own money, Flowers began controlling her accounts and using her cash for his own ends. That included spending the money on drugs, holidays and other gifts for himself, the court heard.
Flowers continued taking cash after Jarvis’s death, aged 82, in a care home near Amersham, Buckinghamshire, in 2016.
Passing sentence, Judge Nicholas Dean KC, the recorder of Manchester, said: “This is a story of betrayal, no less than that. Betrayal by you of an old friend, someone who trusted you, who had every reason to believe she could trust you.
“In truth, you knew all along she could not, because of your own weaknesses and failings.”
Flowers handed himself into police after an arrest warrant was issued. He was brought into court from custody using a walking stick.
The 2013 Mail on Sunday story, headlined “Crystal meth shame of bank chief”, was the starting point for a rapid and public decline in Flowers’ fortunes.
After it, he pleaded guilty at Leeds magistrates court to possessing cocaine, crystal meth and ketamine and was fined £400. Further tabloid stories followed about his use of drugs and male escorts.
He stood down as chair of the Co-operative Bank, a post he had held for more than three years, after a £1.5bn hole was discovered in its finances, but before the Mail on Sunday story.
Flowers, a former Labour councillor in Rochdale and Bradford, was later banned from the financial services industry after the City watchdog found he demonstrated the “lack of fitness and propriety required” to work in the sector.
The Financial Conduct Authority concluded he had used his work mobile telephone to make a number of inappropriate telephone calls to a premium-rate chat line and had used his work email account to send and receive sexually explicit and otherwise inappropriate messages, and to discuss illegal drugs.
In a 2016 interview with the Guardian, Flowers admitted taking drugs and having sex with male sex workers when chair of the Co-op Bank. But he insisted that he tried to be “a decent Christian person” adding: “Please don’t laugh too horribly.”
