A FORMER bank manager who was jailed for stealing £282,000 from customers’ accounts has complained about the quality of the fruit in prison.

Sarah Gibbs, from Worthing, was given a three-and-a-half year sentence in January after taking the cash to spend on a house, a wedding, a car and a pony.

The 33-year-old tried to cover her tracks by falsifying internal bank records and transferring monies from internal branch accounts.

She targeted customers banking at HSBC branches in Goring, Shoreham and Hove. She had worked with the high street branch since 1999 and had been branch manager.

She did not invest the money she stole but instead used it for a £23,000 deposit for a house, £15,000 towards a new car, £3,500 for a wedding deposit, £35,000 towards stabling costs for a pony, holidays totalling £7,500 and £30,000 on trips to Brighton’s Rendezvous Casino and online gambling.

Now five months into her sentence, the 33-year-old, of Ontario Gardens, has sent a letter to national prison newspaper Inside Times, bemoaning the quality of fruit in HMP Send, Surrey.

She said: “At the moment we can purchase pears, kiwis, grapefruit and bananas, but for the last couple of weeks we have not been able to purchase apples or oranges and we are told this is because they are supplied by the prison kitchen. I wonder how many staff have tried eating the apples and oranges that are supplied by the prison?

“As you would expect from a cash-strapped institution whose budgets are being constantly cut, the fruit they supply is the low end of the crop that would not be up to a standard that the general public would expect to see on offer.

“As for the prices we have to pay for the fruit we buy ourselves, yesterday I saw an advert from a well-known supermarket offering the following – six kiwi fruits for 69p, five apples for 69p, a pineapple for 69p and 600g of satsumas for 69p. Compare that to the prices we pay in our canteen – one kiwi fruit 30p, one banana 29p and 59p for two apples or two oranges (when available).

“We earn an average of £10 per week so just buying two pieces of fruit per day would cost us 60% of our entire wage.”

In her letter she also complained that fruit in the canteen has been replaced by Crunchie bars and Chocolate Hazelnut Spread.

She concluded: “I wonder if people are having the same issues in other prisons and if you have any ideas of what we can do about this.”