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The party poopers

Michael just never knew when he'd had enough...


Published by: Natasha David-Hilton & Louie Matthews
Published on: 21st July 2011

Two heads were leaning in together, giggling. One was covered with greying hair, the other with fluffy blond locks. I smiled, knowing what was going on. ‘No more biscuits,’ I laughed.
Two guilty faces popped up, grinning. ‘Sorry,’ smiled company accountant Michael Crowther, 53, wiping crumbs from his mouth and pointing at my grandson Thomas, five. ‘He made me.’
Me and my husband Alan, 64, owned Magden, a building supplies company, and Michael was one of our loyal colleagues.
He didn’t have his own kids, but doted on Thomas.
Such a family man, he adored his elderly mum and visited her every Friday night.
He’d worked for us for seven years, and it was more like having a friend around the office than an employee. Mind you, it was the same with everyone in the office.. We all got on so well, and people often described us as their extra family.
‘If our staff are happy, so are we,’ was Alan’s motto.
‘Too right, we owe so much to their hard work,’ I always agreed.
Theirs and our own. We’d started the company 25 years ago in our spare room. Back then, I’d juggled working as a childminder with helping Alan stock-take in the evenings.
It took years of hard slog, long hours, weekends sacrificed, but gradually the company had grown until we had 60 staff. Never in my wildest dreams had I thought we’d be so successful!
But we’d still looked after the pennies, staying in the same house, even after having our kids Lydia, 39, and Matthew, 37. We never were the flashy types.
And we never forgot we owed so much to our employees. We always gave them bonuses and other little perks, like the silver Mercedes company car Michael drove.
Now it was time for us to step back though, look at retiring. ‘Another firm’s offered to buy us out,’ Alan had told me a couple of weeks back. ‘But I’ll only agree to it if our staff keep their jobs.’
‘That’s the least we can do,’ I agreed.
Michael was getting our accounts ready for the sale. It was clearly a bigger job than expected though, seemed to be taking him ages. ‘Come on Thomas,’ I smiled to my grandson now. ‘Time to leave Michael to his work.’
‘We were having a biscuit-eating competition,’ he said.
‘We’ll finish it later,’ smiled Michael.
‘Okay,’ he said, wandering off to find Alan.
‘What’s up?’ beamed Michael.
‘I know you’re sad to see us go,’ I said. ‘But we need the accounts.’
‘Mary, sorry, I’ll get straight on to it,’ he gasped. I’d no doubt. He was worth every penny we paid him, even worked Saturdays without overtime, and always banked our cheques.
‘The walk to the bank does me good,’ he’d joke, patting his belly.
A few days later though, disaster struck – one of our branches flooded. The insurance company needed all kinds of paperwork, putting even more pressure on Michael. He didn’t seem to be coping well, wasn’t giving us what we needed.
‘I don’t know what’s wrong with him,’ sighed Alan.
‘Maybe he’s hoping we’ll change our minds about the sale,’ I reasoned.
‘Yeah, I’ll have a look at the books, get things moving,’ he said.
Bless him, he didn’t want to pile more on Michael.
But after a few weeks of working late number-crunching, Alan looked worried. ‘There are a couple of missing payments,’ he said.
‘Are you sure?’ I asked.
‘I’ve gone through the figures twice, there’s £119 here and £250 there,’ he sighed, jabbing the page.
‘You better speak to Michael.’
When Alan got home that night, his face was ashen. ‘Michael confessed to taking some money.’
‘He what?!’ I gasped. ‘How much?’
‘He said he took £250 to pay for dental work, and forgot to pay us back.’
‘But that’s… that’s stealing,’ I said, shocked the friend we’d trusted for seven years could do something like that.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll have words with him tomorrow,’ said Alan.
But he never got the chance. The next day, Michael resigned and cleared his desk. All that was left was a picture of him and his wife Carol, 48, at one of our Christmas parties, with a tableful of drinks.
Seemed odd to leave it, it felt like a snub somehow. But I’d too many other things to think of – like the company sale. We took on a new accountant, who went through everything with a fine tooth comb.
Once he’d finished, he came to see me. From his grim expression, I could tell something was wrong. ‘Erm, over the last five years more than £1.2 million has gone missing from your accounts,’ he announced.
‘What?! Over… over a million pounds?’ croaked Alan.
‘B-but where are we going to find that kind of money to plug the hole?’ I said. All those hours we’d worked, all those staff who relied on us, everything was in jeopardy. How could this have happened?
The answer was simple. Michael had been stealing cash, then destroying invoices to cover his tracks. Our friend had siphoned off a fortune.
We’d no choice but to call the police. When they raided Michael’s house they found £57,000 in cash stuffed into a filing cabinet, £400,000 worth of stocks and £38,000 in premium bonds. His house even had a new £10,000 conservatory and £15,000 kitchen. He was charged with 24 counts of false accounting and theft. ‘We’ve arrested his wife, too,’ police said.
‘Carol?’ I gasped. She’d always been so pleasant when I’d met her at the Christmas parties. But they’d charged her with possessing criminal property. Suddenly, I realised – that photo Michael had left was to mock us. He’d lived the party lifestyle at our expense.
When word got out at work, it was like there’d been a death. Everyone felt numb, betrayed.
The sale of the company fell through, too. In just a few weeks, it had gone from thriving to almost bankrupt, thanks to Michael. Alan and I fought to save it, but we had to close one of our branches, making 16 people redundant. It was heartbreaking – they’d worked hard, didn’t deserve this.
One man’s greed had such a devastating impact!
Michael pleaded guilty, but Carol denied her charges, telling Bolton Crown Court she wasn’t figure-minded. But witnesses said she was a bright woman who must have known she was spending more than she and Michael earned.
My blood boiled. ‘We worked day and night to set up this company, and they just made a fast buck,’ I fumed to Alan.
The jury found Carol guilty. She was given a 12-month suspended sentence and ordered to do 250 hours of unpaid work. Michael was sentenced to five years in prison.
The judge summed up our betrayal perfectly. ‘You laughed and joked with them, and had decent conversations with them as friends. But all that time you were effectively stabbing them in the back,’ he told Michael. ‘By the time it came out, it was almost terminal haemorrhaging for the business.’
He ordered him and Carol to sell their house to pay us back. But it’s too late to give those people their jobs back. Too late to make up for the extra years of hard slog we’ll have to put into the business to get it back to where it was. When Michael stole from us, he took a lot more than just money.
Mary Robinson, 58, Whitefield, Manchester