Nottinghamshire councillor guilty of fraud

An elected Nottinghamshire councillor has been convicted of nine counts of fraud worth over £6000 for claiming and taking funding for a community organisation that didn't exist.

Jason Zadrozny, 46, from Stanton Hill, applied for grants using the local authority’s ‘Councillor’s Discretionary Fund’. This is a small budget allocated to elected councillors to help support community organisations within their constituency. Zadrozny applied to funds to benefit the Ashfield Heritage Society, with a stated purpose of looking after war memorials in the area, persuading other councillors from his party to allocate their budgets to the organisation.

Zadrozny continued the deceit, applying for a further grant for Ashfield Heritage Society in 2021. When he formed part of a group calling itself the Classic Cinema Club, he applied for funds for it too. In total he dishonestly secured £6,200 from the local authority.

Investigations into the funding showed that there was no evidence that the Ashfield Heritage Society had ever existed, but that the funds had been had withdrawn the funds from its account. The sole account holder was the defendant using a fictitious address.

When the offending came to light, Zadrozny was preparing a further application for funds for Ashfield Heritage Society. He called a halt to the application, implying that he had confused his organisation for another and tried to divert it to another local organisation.

A police investigation discovered that there was no such organisation as the Ashfield Heritage Society and concluded that Zadrozny had applied for the funding dishonestly. Zadrozny was arrested and prosecutors from the Crown Prosecution Service East Midlands Complex Casework Unit charged him with 12 counts of fraud by false representation.

Investigations also revealed that Zadrozny had knowingly evaded income tax on rental income on four properties that he owned. He was prosecuted for four counts of fraudulent evasion of income tax.

He was tried at Northampton Crown Court and was on 21 September 2026 found guilty of nine counts of fraud and the four separate counts of fraudulent evasion of income tax.

Janine McKinney from the Crown Prosecution Service said: “Jason Zadrozny was placed in a position of trust by the people he claimed to represent. He used his role to get his hands on taxpayers’ money to which he was not entitled,.

“Zadrozny used his knowledge of the system, to target sources of funding that relied on trust and discretion to use for himself. His web of lies, greed and manipulation has unravelled in the face of the evidence.”

Zadrozny wil be sentenced on 27 November.

Building the Case

Jason Zadrozny’s fraudulent activities were first suspected when an election candidate was researching community expenditure and noticed the grants to the Ashfield Heritage Society (AHS). This individual could not recall any activity carried out by the society and raised a query with the council, that was ultimately passed on to the police.

When Ashfield Heritage Society came under scrutiny, Zadrozny tried to deflect the investigation onto someone who had passed away during the pandemic, even sending a note urging people not to speculate about this individual as they were not there to defend themselves.

Further investigation showed that there was no community organisation operating as the Ashfield Heritage Society. There were no references to the society’s existence online or in official local records. The defendant was the only signatory to the ‘society’s’ accounts and the funds granted to the society from the council had been withdrawn in cash. It was the prosecution’s case that, as only the defendant had access to those funds, he had withdrawn the money and used it for his own purposes and not for the purpose it was granted.

Investigations into Zadrozny’s financial matters uncovered payments relating to a house purchase that matched the timing and the amount of the first fraudulent claim. Zadrozny had already contributed a sum of his own money, but a further £5,000 was required to complete the purchase. Within a month of the grant being made to the Ashfield Heritage Society, Zadrozny made two withdrawals totalling £5,000 from the AHS account and within 14 minutes, that amount was deposited in cash into the account of Zadrozny’s associate who was dealing with the house purchase.   It was the prosecution’s case that Zadrozny made these withdrawals to cover the shortfall in funds and that he later profited significantly from the subsequent sale of the property.

The CPS presented further evidence that Zadrozny’s withdrawals from the Classic Cinema Club account coincided with his own accounts going overdrawn.

Both sets of transactions were presented by the prosecution as evidence that Zadrozny was using the money he had secured from the council as his own.

The CPS also presented evidence that Zadrozny had provided an address for the society that did not exist. We also presented evidence that he insisted on collecting the payments himself, rather than them being sent to the society. The prosecution’s case was that this was evidence of deliberate deception, carried out for Zadrozny to have sole access to the grant money for his own ends.