Village people shocked by AWOL accountant

TS knows all to well how easily you can move from upstanding pillar of the community to persona non grata.

We sometimes try to forget how we ended up where we are, but we are constantly haunted by the nightmares of the time we mistakenly tried to expose the local vicar as a head of a drugs cartel, only to discover his ‘herbal’ tea evenings were not a clever cover for a crack house.

So too has accountant Malcolm Tune suffered a similar fate. The father of five, lay reader, member of the village church choir, am-dram enthusiast and auditor of the local scout group has been given three years in jail for his part in a £2.5m tax fiddle.

The sentence was handed down in his absence, as this community pillar has legged it to Asia to avoid prison for administering a complex tax evasion scheme involving offshore banks on the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands.

Tune claimed the set-up was avoidance and not evasion, although in the current climate TS sees little difference, but we suspect his place in the choir may be under threat.