A former director of the Scottish Women’s Premier League (SWPL) was jailed for six months last week after being found guilty of an elaborate scam.
It is the culmination of a bizarre story involving a lame greyhound, forged letters from banks and the upper echelons of Scottish football.
An Edinburgh court heard that Zola McGoldrick told “lie after lie” in swindling her landlord out of almost £30,000 ($38,000) — for which she was found guilty of fraud in October. McGoldrick rented a three-bedroom flat in Edinburgh from Roddy Glen, living in it with her two children, but failed to pay him any of the £1,500-per-month rental instalments due over 18 months.
The landlord says she gave a “complicated explanation” for her failure to pay, saying she was the victim of a scam. She provided him with evidence in the form of letters from the Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Bank as well as the UK tax authorities, which said she had issues accessing her account.
But all this evidence was fake.
“Your behaviour was deliberate and when your story started to unravel you failed to admit your guilt and your behaviour had elements of confidence trickery in it,” said Sheriff Roderick Flinn in Edinburgh on Tuesday. “The reality is that the only appropriate sentence for a fraud of this nature is a custodial sentence.”
The Athletic has spoken to the victim in the case who suggests the SWPL could have done more due diligence before appointing a con woman to a senior role.
“She may be a pathological liar,” says Glen. “There is something that seems sociopathic about her.”
An SWPL spokesperson said the organisation was “completely unaware of this situation until October 12 when the case was determined by Edinburgh Sheriff Court”, adding that McGoldrick immediately quit her role when the news came to light.
McGoldrick rented a three-bedroom flat in Edinburgh (Roddy Glen)
Glen first came in contact with McGoldrick after she replied to an advert he placed on the website Gumtree for a flat he owns in the Scottish capital. All seemed well and the flat seemed ideal for a woman moving from Australia to Scotland with two children.
They agreed on a figure of £1,400 per month and a condition of no pets. Glen asked for references, as is standard, and had a phone conversation with a woman who claimed to be McGoldrick’s previous landlady, who reported back that she was a model tenant.
The first sign that something might be amiss was when she said she planned to move in with her dog, a lame greyhound named Smiley, in breach of the ‘no pets’ listing. Glen agreed to allow this while charging £100 extra per month to cover the increased wear and tear to the flat.
But then things started to get really strange.
She never paid the first month’s rent after spinning a complex story that she had considerable funds from her house sale in Australia but could not access them.
Landlord Roddy Glen (Roddy Glen)
“(The money) had seemingly been caught up in some high-level money laundering criminality somewhere between Australia and the UK,” says Glen, adding that she provided evidence for this in the form of letters from two British banks and the tax authorities. “She mentioned Dubai.”
“These letters looked genuine, they had proper letterheads on them, proper logos, proper addresses,” he said. “We swallowed it hook, line and sinker, we felt sorry for her.”
McGoldrick’s story became more and more elaborate, detailing meetings between various banks and authorities, with details of hacked computer schemes and compensation schemes that were about to pay her the house funds that were rightfully hers.
Glen had still not received a penny in rent — at which point a neighbour advised him to look McGoldrick up online.
Scotland’s top women’s teams formed a new league and cup competition in 2022 that saw the competitions become part of the SPFL (Scottish Professional Football League), which also runs the men’s game.
The two-tier women’s competition includes names famous from the men’s game, including Rangers and Celtic, but also women-only clubs.
One is Boroughmuir Thistle, based in Edinburgh, whose representative to the SWPL was Zola McGoldrick.
She was appointed as one of the directors of the new competition when it was inaugurated last year in a ceremony at Hampden Park in Glasgow and quickly became a prominent figure in the women’s game in Scotland, winning a prestigious award three months later after doing volunteer work at Boroughmuir High School.
A source who knew her, speaking on condition of anonymity because of fear of repercussions, says she was “full of ideas” for Scottish women’s football. McGoldrick networked her way into the upper reaches of the nation’s game having moved to Scotland with her two children.
“She spent a lot of time volunteering and was putting together various proposals for a programme promoting opportunities in football and sport for young women,” says Glen, who used to work in the marketing industry — expertise that his ex-tenant called upon as a favour. “I helped her draw a business proposal to make a proposal to the bank.”
“It all went nowhere… but you could see that she had her eye on ultimately doing something that she liked and perhaps even joining the ranks of the great and the good.”
There is no suggestion anyone at the SWPL knew anything about the saga.
“This came as a complete shock to everyone at the league,” a spokesperson for the SWPL said. “Zola tendered her resignation from her non-executive position at the SWPL the same day and it was accepted by the board with immediate effect.”
She is also listed as a member of the Arctic Sustainability Lab, a research institution in Tromso, Norway, that is part of the Arctic University of Norway.
Oddly, in late November, between McGoldrick’s trial and her sentencing, the Facebook page for one of the university’s initiatives uploaded photos of its Christmas event — featuring McGoldrick having a conversation over some snacks.
While McGoldrick was becoming a mover-and-shaker in Scottish football, she was harbouring secrets — as her landlord found out when he did some research online.
His tenant also went by the name of Zola Affley and there was a judgment against a person of that name, issued by the Housing and Property Chamber of the First-tier Tribunal for Scotland, in the public domain and visible online.
It detailed how she had failed to pay £4,800 in rent to a previous landlady. The judgement also explained how McGoldrick had said she had the funds but it was tied up in property abroad and the proceeds were unavailable, this time with a slightly different story involving a family trust in Australia.
While the story seemed strikingly similar, one detail made the new landlord smell a rat — the name given for her previous landlady was not the person he had spoken to on the phone for a reference.
He then established contact with the other victim, who explained McGoldrick had spun a similar story while not paying the rent.
He eventually confronted his tenant, but she stuck to her guns despite the overwhelming evidence that she was being deceitful.
“It’s very interesting how she will stick to clinging to the utterly improbable and she did this during the trial as well,” says Glen.
Upon sentencing McGoldrick, Sheriff Roderick Flinn criticised her “lengthy course of fraudulent conduct”. She will now be spending Christmas behind bars.
“You provided the complainers with endless excuses for the non-payment of your rent, supported by documents forged by you,” he said. “You told them lie after lie. Their loss was of the order £28,400. They are receiving modest payments of a small part only of that sum. The rest is irrecoverable.”
Defence lawyer Michael Ellis said: “McGoldrick feels apologetic about the impact on her previous landlords.” He added that she had been studying at Edinburgh University.
Glen hit a brick wall when he reported McGoldrick to the police and eventually got them to take it seriously after paying £1,800 for a written legal opinion which was presented to the police, acknowledging he is fortunate to be able to afford this.
“Justice is beyond the reach of the ordinary person in the UK,” he says. “It’s too expensive, too time-consuming, too much effort, and most people can’t make the machine work in the way that it should work.”
He is being paid £30 a month by McGoldrick but does not expect to ever again see the vast majority of the £28,400 he has lost.
Although he does not hold the SWPL responsible, he says they could have done more due diligence on McGoldrick before appointing her to such a prominent role in the national game, noting that the document relating to the rent arrears in 2019 was in the public domain.
“You just have to move on sometimes,” he told The Athletic. “I don’t know what else can be done really. I certainly don’t want to hurl myself on the rocks of litigation for the rest of my life.”
(Top photos: Roddy Glen and Alan Harvey/SNS Group via Getty Images)
2023-12-20 13:40:52
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