Following the furore over widespread lackadaisical record-keeping for on duty expenses within the Met police force, a detective has been jailed for 10 months for impressively audacious abuses of the company credit card.
Detective Sergeant Richard de Cadenet's level of spending suggests he wasn't entirely thinking straight or even criminally when he laid out for Mexican holidays, luxury electrical goods, a snazzy new wardrobe and £18,000 of hard cash from the hole in the wall. You'd be hard pushed to justify that lot with lies to a high flying investment bank employer (specially in this economic climate) let alone defraud the boys in blue.
De Cadenet's lawyer expresses it thus: "He was buying what he thought was attention and affection... a man who was simply unable to cope." Perhaps his extravagant cry for help might have been heard earlier if the Met had had appropriate credit limits and procedures of accountability in place to curb such outrageously noticeable expenditure by one person over a 15 month period. We might have hoped then that de Cadenet's pathological spending addiction or alleged personal problems could have been addressed within the Met's disciplinary and pastoral care environment, rather than banging him up.
Image courtesy of doyoubleedlikeme's Flickrstream under the Creative Commons Attribution licence.
