A WOMAN who ran up huge loans and then stole from her employers to fund her suicidal brother's drug addiction has no remaining assets that can be confiscated, a court was told.

Although defence lawyers representing Tracy Griffiths, 43, have accepted that she benefitted from crime to the tune of £8,710.38, she has nothing available to repay the losers, Gloucester Crown Court was told.

Recorder Karol Lasok QC made an order confiscating a nominal £1 from Mrs Griffiths who had received a suspended jail sentence in August.

At last year's hearing the court was told that in her desperation to prevent her brother killing himself she kept him supplied with heroin which was paid for with the proceeds of her crimes.

Mrs Griffiths, a previously respectable book-keeper and office manager, of Turner Road, Cam, who had never been in court before, had admitted two charges of theft and two of false accounting and asked for 18 similar offences taken into consideration.

She stole all the money from Denman Contract Services, for whom she worked as bookkeeper and office manager from August, 2002, until July last year.

Nigel Fryer, defending at that hearing, produced evidence to the court of the inheritance she had received - £7,000 from her grandfather in 1999 - which she then spent on her brother without her family's knowledge.

She then started borrowing money until her loans reached £20,000.

It was after that that she began to steal.

Prosecution barrister Nick Fridd told the court on Monday it had been agreed with the defence that the amount by which she had benefitted from her offences was £8,710-38 (pounds) but that she now had no assets which could be confiscated.