What made Asil Nadir think he could get away with it?

In returning to Britain from his native northern Cyprus, the fugitive boss of the ill-fated Polly Peck business empire made the biggest gamble of his life - and lost.

"It was the era when Peter Clowes was conning investors, when Robert Maxwell was raiding the Mirror pension fund and all sorts of skulduggery was happening at BCCI," says Larry Elliott in The Guardian. Nonetheless, it is Polly Peck "with its slightly ludicrous name, its rakish chief executive and its meteoric rise and fall" that best captures the 1980s, in all its "garish, tin-plated glory".

Those memories came flooding back last week when Asil Nadir, 71, was sentenced to ten years for stealing £28.8m from the group, which collapsed with debts of £550m in 1990. The actual sum he siphoned off to take to Cyprus was probably far bigger more like £380m. After the bungled investigation that precipitated Nadir's dramatic flight from justice in 1993 (see below), the Serious Fraud Office was taking no chances. To nail him, it brought just 13 sample charges.

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