London: An NHS worker was on Tuesday facing jail after taking more than half a million pounds from a world-renowned cancer hospital and splashing the cash on her wedding.

Stacey Tipler, 32, siphoned off £642,000 (Dh3.9 million) from the drugs fund of the Royal Marsden, London while working in the accounts department.

Southwark Crown Court heard how she diverted payments meant for suppliers to the bank accounts of a criminal gang run by her fiance, Scott Chaplin, 33.

The funds were then withdrawn and split, with Tipler using her share to put down a £3,000 deposit on her wedding venue and clear debts of £30,000.

Others in the gang bought designer clothes from Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and Selfridges, as well as expensive gadgets including an iPhone, laptop and television. One paid off some of his mortgage and spent £200 on skydiving lessons at London Parachute School.

Meanwhile, patients at the hospital were put at risk when firms who had not received their payments threatened to stop supplying life-saving drugs.

Tipler was planning to get married in May 2013, but she was arrested a year before her big day. Yesterday, on the eve of her sentencing, Judge Anthony Leonard QC said the fraud was “highly professional” and “brilliant but dishonest”. He added: “I’ve not seen a better one, frankly, in the course of dealing with quite a few years of fraud.”

Tipler and Chaplin, of Carshalton, Sutton, were found guilty of conspiracy to defraud after a two-week trial. Chaplin was also found guilty of money laundering. The other six members of the gang had earlier admitted converting criminal property.

The court heard that Tipler had a clean record and worked at the hospital for ten years. She had been with Chaplin, who ran a window-fitting business, for 16 years and they have two children aged four and nine months.

Chaplin, described as the “co-ordinator” of the scam, had recruited the others in the gang, mostly through his work.

Over a period of four months, from December 2011 Tipler used the hospital’s electronic payment system to input bank details of the gang in the place of those of the suppliers, duplicating some payments so as not to raise suspicion, the court heard.

The money was then withdrawn in lump sums of £5,000 at a time from each account, much of which was fed back to Chaplin.

But their scheme was discovered when suspicious staff at suppliers Alliance Healthcare told the NHS that they had received two remittance slips with no accompanying payment.

Investigators have only been able to claw back around half of the stolen cash, with the hospital still £310,000 out of pocket.

Prosecutor Anthony Hucklesby said: [The hospital’s] patients tend to have more complex types of cancer and this fraud targeted the suppliers of essential cancer drugs to the hospital.

`This was a fraud committed in gross breach of trust on Miss Tipler’s part and a repeated targeting of the hospital on those numerous discrete occasions when bank details were substituted in by her.’

All the defendants will be sentenced Wednesday.