Then there was Sharon Bridgewater who got five years for stealing more than £2m from employers, buying flash cars, going to expensive restaurants and taking some very up market holidays.

I’ve said it before FDs are very well positioned to fleece the company if they want to. They know how the accounting works and can quickly become very adept at covering their tracks. Fortunately few do it.

But in the words of a policeman I met some time ago ‘crime does pay.’ I won’t reveal his name for fear of embarrassment, since he has broken with the key tenet of crime fighting – don’t admit it pays.

His point was only a percentage of crime, especially of fraud gets detected, an even smaller proportion of the money is recovered and only a fraction of the perpetrators are brought to book.

Why? Because of a simple cost benefit analysis. If it’s not a really big fraud it’s not worth the police getting involved – they employ very few fraud experts. If company bosses discover a fraud internally they are more likely to bring in a freelance expert track down who is responsible, fire them and keep the whole affair under wraps. Far better to stop the fraud, and fill the hole in the system rather than spend time on criminal proceedings, which may or may not work.

This kind of approach to financial crime creates open season for people like Bridgewater. We can look forward to more lurid fraud stories in our courts for a long time to come.