Fare dodging hedge fund manager. Right or wrong to let him off?

LargeAddick said:

Some of this doesn't add up from what has been reported. I don't quite understand how having an Oyster card has helped him. I travel from Battle, three stops beyond Stonegate, and we have our tickets checked at least once each journey, morning and night. I assume he has too so if he hadn't had a ticket then he'd have had to have bought one on the train. It's perfectly okay to board without a ticket as you are able to purchase on board as ticket office could easily be busy when you arrive. Seeing as most trains are fast from High Brooms to London Bridge during rush hours you can't even say you got on at Orpington, for example, to reduce the price you pay. Interesting too that he paid back over 42k. A season ticket from Stonegate costs £4,500 a year so over five years, allowing for year on year price increases, he could have bought season tickets for say 21.5k. I assume they have calculated what he owed on him having made single, maybe return, daily journeys.

Personally, he's a scumbag. I hate people who are not prepared to pay their way, think they can get one over on the train company and us, the passengers, who suffer fare rises because of knobs like this. I'm glad he has had to repay this money but not that he remains anonymous. I think he should be made to wear a sign round his neck saying 'I'm the fare paying cheat' for a year and hopefully that will shame him into not doing it again. He's lucky his employers don't know, I don't a hedge fund company would want to employ someone so dishonest.

I am puzzled too at how he got away with it.

That is to say, why did he not get blocked by the barriers in London?

Surely the system (if he was using an Oyster as reported) would have picked it up as being invalid because he had not 'checked in' elsewhere on the system?

Also, surely the barriers at London mainline stations must have some way of realising a 'short journey' Oyster card as being suspicious in the morning rush as trains arrive from the Home Counties?

LargeAddick said:

Some of this doesn't add up from what has been reported. I don't quite understand how having an Oyster card has helped him. I travel from Battle, three stops beyond Stonegate, and we have our tickets checked at least once each journey, morning and night. I assume he has too so if he hadn't had a ticket then he'd have had to have bought one on the train. It's perfectly okay to board without a ticket as you are able to purchase on board as ticket office could easily be busy when you arrive. Seeing as most trains are fast from High Brooms to London Bridge during rush hours you can't even say you got on at Orpington, for example, to reduce the price you pay. Interesting too that he paid back over 42k. A season ticket from Stonegate costs £4,500 a year so over five years, allowing for year on year price increases, he could have bought season tickets for say 21.5k. I assume they have calculated what he owed on him having made single, maybe return, daily journeys.

Personally, he's a scumbag. I hate people who are not prepared to pay their way, think they can get one over on the train company and us, the passengers, who suffer fare rises because of knobs like this. I'm glad he has had to repay this money but not that he remains anonymous. I think he should be made to wear a sign round his neck saying 'I'm the fare paying cheat' for a year and hopefully that will shame him into not doing it again. He's lucky his employers don't know, I don't a hedge fund company would want to employ someone so dishonest.

Wife travels up from Hastings and tells me the same re having her ticket checked...and your dead right the figures don't add up.

And he's a palarse supporter.

The article clearly states he never checked in and therefore when he checked out he was charged the minimum.oyster fare for not checking in, which was £7.20.

randy andy said:

The article clearly states he never checked in and therefore when he checked out he was charged the minimum.oyster fare for not checking in, which was £7.20.

I always thought that If you don't check in with Oyster the barrier doesn't work when you check out and SE staff usually give you a £20 fine.

I know that if you check in and then don't check out you get charged the minimum £7.20.

Reckon good quality faked season ticket from his station with photocard, and a zone 1 oyster season to get in and out.

The likelihood is that if the case had gone to court, Southeastern would have struggled to prove that he had travelled without a fare on more than a few occasions (certainly in the face of expensive cross-examination). They would have needed to trawl through CCTV evidence and even that in itself would only prove he travelled, not that he didn't have a valid ticket (which he could have claimed to have purchased for cash on a day-by-day basis).

However as has been noted it would not be in this person's interest to have the case in the public domain given the 'integrity' issue so a forty grand settlement is likely an extremely good result for Southeastern.

Should be dragged out into the nearest town square and there to be hanged drawn and quartered in front of a baying crowd of poor people.

It makes me SO ANGRY!

soapy_jones said:

Should be dragged out into the nearest town square and there to be hanged drawn and quartered in front of a baying crowd of poor people.

It makes me SO ANGRY!

Sounds like you should move to Iran or the tribal regions of Pakistan - you'd like it there.

Jints said:

LenGlover said:

Traditional standards of morality are no longer a consideration in 21st Century Britain as exemplified by the actions of the parasitical scum whom masquerade as MPs and MEPs.

What nonsense. The political classes were way more rapacious and corrupt on the "good old days" than they are now.

Rotten boroughs, sales of peerages (Lloyd-George & Wilson to mention just two). The Marconi scandal, the Shell crisis, Suez, the list goes on and on.

Miller's little bit of accountancy wouldn't even have registered in the old days. Who now remembers that Chruchill secretly took £5,000 (millions today) from Burmah oil to lobby for concessions in Persia.

Churchill (theoretically at least) was acting in the interests of British taxpayers by securing oil supplies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Persian_Oil_Company

Who, other than herself, benefited from the actions of Maria Miller and the countless others of her ilk?

ValleyGary said:

randy andy said:

The article clearly states he never checked in and therefore when he checked out he was charged the minimum.oyster fare for not checking in, which was £7.20.

I always thought that If you don't check in with Oyster the barrier doesn't work when you check out and SE staff usually give you a £20 fine.

I know that if you check in and then don't check out you get charged the minimum £7.20.

Correct, I witnessed somebody arguing the toss over this at CX this morning. She hadn't checked in, and got caught, £20 fine straight away.

As I said earlier, we aren't getting the full story on this.

If nothing else, the train company have been negligent in not checking whether he was traveling on a valid ticket for an inordinate amount of time.
Wouldn't look good in court.

I don't condone what he did.

He needs to be named and shamed.

So, there we have it - banned for life from working in financial services. Interesting quote, too, from the FCA that he should have been a role model in the light of other recent matters relating to a club in Sheffield.

bbc.com/news/business-30475232

Riviera said:

He needs to be named and shamed.

And he has been.

'saving' 42 grand has probably cost him millions .. here endeth the lesson