The Citi sandwich case shows why some rule-benders get a lot more sympathy than others. If a company wants to fire someone, the easiest way to do it is to go through their expenses.
It concerned a man named Szabolcs Fekete, who was a senior analyst atuntil he claimed two coffees and two sandwiches on expenses after taking his partner on a business trip to Amsterdam last year.
I laughed aloud myself when I came across a part of the ruling where the judge wrote that the circumstances of the case included the fact that Citi “operates in a highly regulated financial sector and requires its employees to act with utmost integrity at all times”. Citi was among 20 large banks that collectively paid more than £377 billion in such costs between 2008 and 2018, as a result of mis-selling, money-laundering, market abuse and other misdemeanours, the researchers found.These costs did not necessarily relate to a single individual. And no one wants a bank to employ anyone it thinks is dishonest. But the scale of these sums makes one wonder about dismissing someone for sandwiches and coffee.
It is not entirely clear how rife expenses fraud is. Research on the topic tends to be done by companies that sell expenses software and so are hardly disinterested observers.