A man has been jailed for setting up hidden cameras in a woman’s bedroom after she allowed him access to her home to feed her dog.
Jurors unanimously found Vispy Bamboat guilty of two voyeurism charges at Aberdeen Sheriff Court last month.
The 47-year-old head chef was remanded in custody after being found guilty of spying on the woman by installing a covert camera and voice recorder at her home.
Bamboat admitted fitting the equipment in the 42-year-old’s house in Aberdeen when he was questioned by police officers. However he claimed she was aware the devices were there.
Yesterday Sheriff Graham Buchanan said Bamboat was a “controlling, manipulative, deceitful and dishonest” man who had tried to advance a “preposterous” defence.
He said: “You are an arrogant and high handed man who thinks you can do as you please without consequence.
“During your evidence those present in the room were squirming with embarrassment and revulsion when you were talking in such a disgraceful fashion about your victim.
“You displayed no genuine remorse and having heard your evidence I’m not surprised about that. Such regret that you express to the social workers is entirely false and designed only to save your own skin.
“You carried out these carefully planned acts for your own selfish reasons without a second thought for the distress, humiliation and alarm you caused your victim.”
The sheriff said that due to the “seriousness of the offences” there was no alternative to a custodial sentence.
He was jailed for 18 months and placed on the sex offenders’ register for 10 years. A non-harassment order was also granted forbidding Bamboat from having contact with his victim for the next 10 years.
During his evidence in the course of the trial Bamboat claimed that the woman had instructed him to put the recorders in place for her own protection as she told him she was “scared and threatened” by some of her “male friends”.
However the woman denied this and said she had no idea she was being spied on until she found the voice recorder taped to the back of a clock on her bedroom wall.
She later found the camera, which had been pointing at her bed, poking through a tiny hole in an air vent on her ceiling.
Bamboat, of 175 Dalriada Crescent, Motherwell, had originally told officers that he wanted to “catch” the woman having sex.
However he told jurors that he had been lying to police when he said that.