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A military court has sentenced Commander Anthony Gray to six months in gaol for fiddling £53,000 pounds of school fees grant. It isn’t important to go into the details of the crime which has come to light because of an acrimonious divorce.
Apart from the prison sentence Gray was required to repay the money that he fraudulently claimed. Quite right too of course. Where things start to get a bit crazy is in his being sacked from the Navy with his pension lump sum of £96,000 and annual income of £32,000 intact.
Gray is 49 years old, fit and with significant skills. He should be able to move onto another career in which he might be expected to be able to earn a healthy income. This man is quite obviously no danger to the public. He has broken the trust with his employers and it is right that he must lose his job, but why on earth do taxpayers have to be landed with the cost of keeping him in prison when he could be on the way to being a tax paying worker again.
Obviously he should pay back the money he fiddled. That’s not going to be a problem with his £96k lump sum is it? Instead of making this man more expensive to the public, why wasn’t his punishment a financial one? Instead of just paying back the cash that he ripped off from us it would be a more appropriate punishment for him to forfeit the whole of the £96k.
Instead of his silly piece of theatre in saying that Gray would be punished with ‘the clang of the prison door’, Judge Advocate Alistair McGrigor should have used his brain a bit and worked out what was in the best interests of society as well as penalising Gray appropriately.
Related articles
- Navy commander jailed for boarding school fraud (telegraph.co.uk)
