time Only two jailings for you leftie bastards to gloat over this time. Josef Szrajber and Paulo Sorelli, two self-styled "oil industry information brokers', both got three years' porridge apiece after bribing senior British Petrolcum bosses to reveal confidential details of contract bids.
This info was then sold on to BP's competitors, allowing them to win work worth £100m. In addition, Szrajber was fined £407,000 and Sorelli £429,000 - less than half of the E1.7m the duo pocketed from the scam Nice mark up, chaps. Unlike Szrajber and Sorelli, Tony Cole - former chairman and chief executive of collapsed finance and property group Bestwood - Is Still a free man. I must confess that even I am slightly perplexed by this one.
After all, our Tony did plead guilty to eight charges including perjury. false accounting, authorising loans contrary to the Companies Act and making a aise statementto an auditor Cole misused some £712,000 of Bestwood money, including some taken from a pension fund. to bankroll his stock exchange dealings in the mid-eighties. He says he intended to give the cash nately came a cropper in the October 1987 crash the pay-off he got as compensation for quitting the group he ripped off in the first place.
His punishment was just two years suspended and 10 years disqualification from company directorship. Lenient beak, or dosh.
More money for nothing. Chris Greentree was ousted from his chief executive post at oil company Lasmo, after it lost a trifling £385 million. His last year's pay, some £480,647, included a "performance bonus' of £50,000. This rather makes you wonder what Lasmo would have forked out if it had actually made a profit.
To soften the blow of his departure, Greentree got a £2.2 pay-off, and $189,000-a-ycar pension. On, and £44,000 to cover repatriation expenses'.
Meanwhile, Jolin Ansdell, finance director of the Trafalgar House conglomerate, copped