Two Tesco staff quit over profit hole

TWO Tesco workers felt so compromised by the ‘biggest kept secret’ in the supermarket – the grocer’s inflating of profits in 2014 – that they quit their jobs, a court heard yesterday.

Richard Parsons and Aysen Nadiri ‘felt so compromised by the mis-recording of profits that they resigned rather than engage in what they considered to be practices that were unlawful’, prosecutors said.

Carl Rogberg, 50, Chris Bush, 51, and John Scouler, 49, are alleged to have failed to correct inaccurately recorded income figures which were published to auditors, other employees and the market.

The supermarket’s former finance chief, managing director and food commercial head are charged with fraud by abuse of position and false accounting between February and September 2014. They all deny the charges. They were investigated after Tesco was found to have inflated its profits.

A public announcement on September 22, 2014, which stated that it had previously over-estimated its profits by approximately £250m, sent ‘shockwaves’ through the stock market, Southwark Crown Court in London has heard.

The three are accused of ‘cooking the books’ in a scandal which wiped £2bn off the supermarket’s total share value.

Sasha Wass QC, prosecuting, told jurors that Parsons, a project manager who in an exit interview said ‘It has broken me’, was angry at having been put in a position which compromised his ethics.

Accountant Nadiri quit in 2014 after claiming senior management had a disregard ‘for proper accounting principles’.