A toilet roll tycoon’s bid to get away with an 11-year benefits scam has gone down the pan . . . after his wife pulled the chain on their marriage.

Now disgraced fraudster James McGregor will be forced to hand his share of the money from the sale of the family home back to the Government agency that had subsidised the crooked businessman for more than a decade.

The convicted crook has been left a three-time loser after being:

l BANNED from holding a company directorship for 10 years after providing false ac

counts for his toilet roll company;

l JAILED for nine months for benefits fraud, and;

l DIVORCED by his wife Angela for his womanising and gambling.

The shamed north Belfast conman’s unravelling business and personal life is detailed in a High Court judgment published last week.

The divorce case ruling — which did not identify McGregor (55) by name — detailed how mortgage payments on his £325,000 home had been met from social security funds for more than 10 years.

The dodgy businessman had claimed income support for himself, his wife and his child from June 1993 until April 2004 on the basis that he was unfit for work and that neither he nor his wife had any source of income.

However, it later emerged that McGregor’s wife had been the sole owner of a hairdressing business since the mid-1980s, which he had failed to declare when applying for benefits.

It also emerged that McGregor had been running his own business, Flexicare, which sold toilet rolls and other paper products and soft drinks from premises at Bloomfield Road, Mayo Street and Crumlin Road in Belfast.

His company was eventually wound up by its creditors in March 2006 with debts of more than £600,000 — run up at around the time that McGregor was gambling hundreds of pounds a day on horseracing and football betting.

Accounts provided by his bookmakers showed that on one day in October 2004 he blew almost £800 on the result of a rugby match, and the following day he spent £300 betting on football matches and £1,500 on horses.

It’s believed that McGregor’s wife knew nothing about his income support fraud — nor about the money that her husband was receiving from the state to pay for the mortgage on the family home.

But she will still have to hand back half of the value of the mortgage payments when their luxury Inver Avenue property is

finally sold. McGregor, jailed for nine months on 11 counts of fraud at Belfast Crown Court last year, will have to put the money towards fulfilling a confiscation order demanding that he pay back more than £122,000 because of his years of cheating the Social Security Agency.

In settling his divorce, McGregor had also unsuccessfully asked for a share of jewellery that he had gifted to his wife over the years. He claimed his gifts were worth £150,000, while his wife valued it at £19,000. The judge, Master Redpath, stated: “It is distasteful in the extreme to have to enter a debate about how much a gift, freely given, should be taken into account in proceedings such as these.

“Given the valuation provided and the other circumstances in this case, I do not intend to take the jewellery into account.”

The judge ordered that the home be sold and proceeds divided half-and-half — but ordered that Mrs McGregor pay back half the money received from the Social Security Agency towards the mortgage so that her ex-husband can put it towards the confiscation order he faces.

He also noted that the Proceeds of Crime Act is “becoming increasingly felt” in divorce settlements.

McGregor last year accepted a whopping 10-year disqualification from holding a directorship in any company after Flexicare was finally wound-up with a shortfall of more than £500,000.

The businessman, who had been bankrupted previously, accepted the disqualification to avoid a court case and potentially an even longer ban.

The move came after the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment accused him of a string of company offences including producing false accounts and evading corporation tax and VAT of more than £130,000.

Sunday Life tracked down McGregor to his apartment in the upmarket Ormiston area of east Belfast to ask him about his chequered past, but he declined to speak.