A charity chief executive who fraudulently claimed £885,000 in gift aid and spent it on buying and renovating a house was able to do so because other trustees regularly signed blank cheques, the Charity Commission’s regulatory case report reveals.

Mark Lewis was sentenced to four years in prison last autumn after admitting to submitting false gift aid claims while he was chief executive of the Welsh Independent School of Climbing (WISC) and Mountaineering Trust, later renamed the MSL Mountaineering Trust.

His wife, Elizabeth Lewis, was sentenced to 18 months imprisonment, suspended for two years. She had denied money-laundering but was found guilty at a trial in September. At the time of the offences she had been a fraud investigator for the Department for Work and Pensions.

At a confiscation hearing in 2014 Mark Lewis was ordered to pay back £5,920 and Elizabeth Lewis was ordered to pay back £37,820, both by 24 October 2014.

HMRC was alerted to Lewis’ fraudulent gift aid claims by the Charity Commission, which had used its powers to obtain the charity’s bank statements and discovered that there was no evidence of £3m in donations.

The Commission opened a regulatory compliance case in March 2011 and concluded its investigations in December that year, but held off publishing the report until the outcome of the confiscation hearing was known.

In June 2010 the Commission was informed by another charity, Bethel City Church (now Breathe City Church), that the donation it had received from WISC was significantly less than was stated in WISC’s accounts. The church had been given £17,000 not £130,000 as stated in WISC’s accounts.

When the Commission investigated it discovered that “the bank statements did not match the information contained in the accounts” and that the majority of payments were made to Mark Lewis or to companies connected to him.

The Commission also found that a gift aid payment of £36,297 had not been deposited in the charity’s bank account and that the auditor named on the accounts had never heard of the charity.

Two former trustees, Richard Hall and Matthew Nicholas, told the Commission that they had regularly signed blank cheques for Mark Lewis because they trusted him.

The case report concludes that: “He (Mark Lewis) appears to have convinced friends, neighbours and acquaintances that being a trustee was little more than an administrative title. He appears to have convinced them that it was acceptable for him to hold all of the charity’s records, and manage the charity’s accounts without them having any real input.

“He had possession of the charity’s cheque books even when he was not a trustee and persuaded trustees to sign blank cheques which enabled him to misappropriate thousands of pounds from the charity.”

Michelle Russell, head of investigations and enforcement, said: "In this case some of the other trustees had misplaced their trust and had been shamefully duped by an individual intent on exploiting a charity for his own gain. It serves as a stark reminder that each trustee must play their part in protecting their charity and be wary of the very real risks posed to charities when they fail in their duties."

The charity was removed from the Register in July 2010.