Barnsley FC owner in court

The owner of Barnsley Football Club became a multi-millionaire by "fiddling" an IT firm's accounts to mislead the stock market, a court heard.

Patrick Cryne, 61, is accused of conspiring with three colleagues at iSoft Group PLC to give an inaccurate account of how the company was doing for their own personal gain.

Jurors were told their was a "huge discrepancy" between the accounts that were published and what they were in reality.

Former chief executive Timothy Whiston, 44, of Lymm, Cheshire, and former directors Stephen Graham, 48, from Knutsford, Cheshire, and John Whelan, 45, of Cheadle Hulme, Stockport, appeared in the dock as they went on trial at London's Southwark Crown Court.

However jurors were told that Cryne, who was chairman of the company at the time, will be tried separately at a later date due to illness. Beginning his opening of the case, prosecutor Richard Latham QC said that Cryne and Graham became multi-millionaires from the alleged crime, while the other two defendants also became rich.

All of them received substantial annual bonuses on top of their salaries. He told jurors that as a public limited company the firm, which specialises in providing software for health service providers, had to publish details of its accounts twice yearly.

Whiston, Graham and Whelan all deny a single charge of conspiring together to make statements, promises or false acts about iSoft Group PLC which they knew to be false, misleading or deceptive.The offences are alleged to have been carried out between October 2003 and July 2006.