Jail for City accountant who stole £9m

A gambling-mad accountant who stole more than £9 million from his City employers to fund a life of luxury and feed his rampant addiction was jailed for five years today.

In a "sophisticated" series of thefts, Wing Kit Chu, 32, spent more than four years "simply slipping" the money out from under the noses of chiefs at international engineering giant Charter Plc.

Against the background of an £800 million-a-year turnover, they never once spotted him electronically pocketing up to £150,000 at a time.

He pulled off the massive deception by using the passwords of a couple of a colleagues to log on to in-house computers and authorise scores of massive payments to a couple of spread betting accounts.

Hong Kong-born Chu, described by workmates as "quiet, unassuming and polite", became so hooked he used the Internet up to 30 times a day while sitting at his desk at work to wager and lose ever larger sums on the future and performance of the FTSE and NASDAQ stock indexes.

During one particularly frenetic three-day period his "very high risk" addiction saw him blow a staggering £500,000.

Things became so bad he would even bet on who would score the first goal in a football match.

His lengthy betrayal of trust only came to light after he handed in his notice and was asked to help a replacement reconcile some figures.

After repeatedly failing to explain the inconsistencies, he sent a late-night email to one of his superiors confessing his guilt, London's Southwark Crown Court was told.

By the time auditors had finished doing their sums, they found he had stolen a grand total of £9,237,312.68 - more than twice that taken from Goldman Sachs bankers by City secretary Jyoti De-Laurey.

Chu, who lived into a £600,000 house in Farnham Common, Berkshire, bought with help of some of the pilfered cash, pleaded guilty to 28 counts of theft between January 1 2000, and August 18, 2004.

He also asked for 74 similar offences to be taken into consideration.