Accountant stole £9m to pay for gambling

ACCOUNTANT Wing Kit Chu stole more than £9.2m from his City employers. The 32-year-old took the money from the engineering giant Charter to fund his gambling addiction.

In a sophisticated series of thefts, he spent more than four years taking the money from under the noses of his bosses.

Today Chu, known to colleagues as David, was starting a five-year prison sentence after he admitted 102 offences. Southwark Crown Court heard he got away with it for so long because the amount was 'just peanuts' to the company.

Chu pulled off the massive deception by using colleagues' passwords to log on to company computers and authorise payments to his spread-betting account. The court heard that against the background of an £800m-a-year turnover, Chu 'slipped by unnoticed' as he stole up to £150,000 a time.

Hong Kong-born Chu spent some of the money on a £600,000 four-bedroom home in Farnham Common, Bucks. He moved in six weeks before his arrest.

Chu, described by workmates as 'quiet, unassuming and polite', became so obsessed with gambling on future FTSE and Nasdaq performances that he withdrew almost half a million pounds in three days.

Among the bets he made was who would score the first goal in a football match. The theft only became known after he handed in his notice and was asked to help a replacement to work out discrepancies in some figures.

{1} After repeatedly failing to explain the inconsistencies, he sent an email to a superior confessing his guilt. It read: 'I have failed. I know this is simply unacceptable as an answer. The truth is I can't bear to face you or any other person in the office any longer...I don't expect anybody to understand what I have done because I am not sure myself. I am very, very sorry.'

The court heard that Chu lay low for three weeks before handing himself in last September. Caroline English, defending, said of him: 'From a single room in a cramped, shared Hong Kong house, through his own efforts, determination and sheer hard work, Wing Kit Chu had worked his way up to a senior position with a multinational company.

'He had a good job that paid a good salary and he had a wife...everything should have been set up for a happy ending, but unfortunately Mr Chu had an Achilles heel, an addiction to gambling.'

Judge Peter Fingret demanded to know why Charter took so long to spot the swindle. By the time auditors had finished, £9,237,312 was missing. The judge asked: 'It is peanuts, is it, as far as this company is concerned?' Chu wept as he was sentenced. The judge told him: 'This was a careful, well-planned and executed sequence of thefts.'

Outside court, Detective Sergeant Richard Ward said: 'Chu not only breached the trust of his employers and the shareholders of Charter Plc, but also committed a huge betrayal of his colleagues.'

Charter has said it is trying to recover the money and has also lodged an insurance claim. But any civil action against Chu is likely to recover only a fraction of what he stole.