Wedlake Bell has released research showing that the number of directors being disqualified for financial crime is soaring as the recession takes hold. There has been a 72 per cent increase in the year to the end of March in director disqualification at insolvent companies where directors have been implicated in fraud and other financial crime. So does this mean our brothels and coke dealers are going to be making record profits?

Although fraud can be captivating in itself, sometimes you have to wonder if ripping people off left, right and centre just isn’t enough to excite the interest of the baying crowds these days.  Once the fraud itself is discovered, inevitably it comes to light that the individual involved has spent the most of their time perpertrating the con from the basement of a brothel whilst sucking on a snooker-ball, or they have a have a drug habit nasty enough to tempt Pablo Escobar back from the dead.

Take a peek at these examples. Marc Dreier , the scamming New York lawyer was allegedly a big fan of the high class hookers supplied by famed Hollywood madam Jodi "Babydol" Gibson . Elsewhere, the Times recently reported that "Bernard Madoff was a sexist egomaniac who frequented massage parlours and insulted his staff, according to Eleanor Squillari, secretary to the convicted Ponzi swindler for more than 20 years". And in a home grown case, one of Britain’s most successful City traders, Rajesh Gill, has been awarded £20 million after a judge ruled that his broker defrauded him. In that story the Times reported that, "the judge said that Mr Gill had become “ensnared in a web of deceit” spun by Mr Bomford (the broker), who admitted to the court that he had taken illegal drugs."

Character arguments aside, one can’t deny that an appetite for coke and/or hookers adds spice to the fraudsters’ stories even if it probably has little to do with their penchant for taking innocents to the cleaners.