Working in accounts I could work out what was going wrong in 2 second of hearing these people's stories.

If you can't balance your books you check both sides of the entries because the error can always be on both sides. You never assume one side of the entries are perfect because that's never the case.

This whole case confirms my belief that people should have to pass a test in basic numeracy and accounting practices before they are allowed to run a company. I mean all the same people making the decision to pursue charges against these poor people were also signing of their company's books every year. How can they be trusted to do that if they are clearly incapable? This is why we get so many suddenly discovered massive accounting errors in the UK, even in huge companies.

And of course all the judges and the lawyers involved made the same basic error. The evidence clearly wasn't there at the trials so the whole court process in regards to financial crime needs to be looked at again.

It's also interesting that one of these people's cases is exactly the thing the left might use to do one of their "a postal worker stole £100k and got 2 years in prison but a homeless man stole £1.50 and got 15 years, society is broken" memes. This kind of illustrates why that type of comment is highly misleading. Often when people are accused of stealing thousands or even millions from a company they don't take that money home. It's just that money's gone missing, no one knows where it is and that person is to the blame for it.