DOMINIC LAWSON: I feel I do know the reply to the query all of us are asking: Why on earth would a rich banker dodge £5,900 in prepare fares?

Joseph Molloy had done so well in the financial services industry, he was able to retire last year at the age of 53.

Until then he had been ‘Head of Passive Equity’ at HSBC Global Asset Management (UK).

He commuted on Southeastern Railway en route to that vast bank’s office in the East London financial centre of Canary Wharf from his £2million home in Orpington.

But Mr Molloy, whose CV referred to his skills ‘across exchange-traded funds, alternatively-weighted and multi-factor strategies, in both pooled and segregated structures’, was not paying for his commute the same way as the rest of us who regularly use that line.

On Tuesday, in Inner London Crown Court, he was given a suspended ten-month jail sentence, banned from travelling on Southeastern for a year (that’s no punishment, I can assure you) and ordered to pay the company £5,000.

He had pleaded guilty to engaging in a complex and ingenious fare-dodging scheme, which saved him a total of £5,911 over an estimated 740 journeys.

The basic technique is known as ‘doughnutting’, which involves buying tickets at the beginning and end of the journey, but not covering all the stations in between.

Molloy used false names and addresses to buy two smartcards, for the purpose of making these transactions, and also obtained Jobcentre plus discounts to get a 50 per cent reduction (for which he was not eligible).

The question everyone will be asking is: why would a man so wealthy have taken such a risk to save what must, to him, have been a paltry sum?

Joseph Molloy pleaded guilty to engaging in a complex and ingenious fare-dodging scheme, which saved him a total of £5,911

The former banker commuted on Southeastern Railway en route to the East London financial centre of Canary Wharf from his £2million home in Orpington

The judge, Alexander Stein, said ‘no one can clearly explain’ the reason, while noting that the fraud was ‘sophisticated and involved considerable planning’.

Which actually may be the answer to the question that mystified him. Molloy would, professionally, take pride in spotting anomalies in the pricing of shares – and profiting (legally) by that. Perhaps he also gained similar pleasure in exploiting what he identified as a weakness in the system used to charge for rail fares.

It would have made him feel cleverer than the rest of us sitting alongside him on that Southeastern commuter train.

We, the ordinary herd who paid the full price of our journeys, were, on this reading, the suckers. And for some reason, Molloy, despite being described by his defence lawyer as being ‘involved in his church’, did not consider the immorality of his fraud – or if he did consider it, presumed himself to be above the law. That is almost a definition of arrogance.

It is peculiarly reminiscent of a case 12 years ago, in which a director of the colossal financial asset manager BlackRock, Jonathan Burrows, was found to have dodged tens of thousands of pounds in fares on the same train line.

I took a particular interest in that one, as Burrows embarked on his commute to London at the same East Sussex station I do – Stonegate. That station is a rural one, with no ticket barriers. And the station-master’s office is very irregularly manned.

Burrows would use an Oyster Card when he got to Cannon Street Station in the City of London, incurring a maximum fare of just £7.20. Though his ability to avoid detection on the journey itself – for many years – was a point of discussion by his fellow commuters when the matter reached the newspapers.

To the consternation of some of us, Burrows was never prosecuted: Southeastern let the matter drop after he coughed up £42,550. He never expressed any contrition, only saying what he had done was ‘foolish’. Some psychiatrists explain such behaviour as a form of adrenaline addiction. It’s the risk that is itself the attraction. So the theft is not based on anything connected with financial neediness.

It is not that unusual: a frequently cited US paper from 2008, entitled Prevalence and Correlates of Shoplifting in the United States, stated that people with incomes of $70,000 or higher shoplifted proportionately a third more than those earning no greater than $20,000 a year.

Stanton Samenow, a psychologist who wrote a book called The Myth Of The Out Of Character Crime, recalled one such person he had treated: ‘He had more than enough to money to buy the item. He took it for the thrill of it, to outsmart the establishment…this was all about excitement and building up [his] self-worth.’ Even an elderly billionaire can be prey to a form of this excitement. I am thinking of Lord [Swraj] Paul, who regularly appeared in lists of the wealthiest men in the UK, until his death last year at the age of 94.

The founder of the steel company Caparo, Paul had been nominated to the peerage by Tony Blair and was a friend of Gordon Brown, giving the Labour party £500,000 during the Blair and Brown administrations.

But in 2009, the Sunday Times revealed of Lord Paul that he ‘pretended that a small flat occupied by one of his employees was his main home so he could claim £38,000 in [overnight and travel] expenses from the Lords.

‘Lord Paul never even slept in the flat, despite stating that it was his main residence. The one-bedroom place was occupied by a manager from one of Paul’s hotels, who confirmed that the peer never lived there while claiming the expenses’.

This was the year of the parliamentary expenses scandal. Some MPs and peers were prosecuted and served time in prison. But the police, after investigating, decided not to act against Paul, who had rapidly repaid the improperly claimed expenses.

However, The House of Lords Conduct Subcommittee found that Paul had not made his expenses claims ‘in good faith’. He was made to apologise to the House and suspended from its service for six months.

Many years later, in 2024, an investigation by Tortoise Media established that the billionaire was the most extreme case of a peer claiming his daily ‘attendance’ allowance (then £323 tax-free) while doing virtually no work.

Over the course of the parliament which ended in June 2024, the nonagenarian peer claimed over £100,000 tax-free, while not speaking once in the chamber, submitting a written question or sitting on any committees. And he voted on just one occasion.

Yet he was no miser, as he had given much to a number of charities.

Mystified, I asked an acquaintance who had worked with Lord Paul why a man worth an estimated £2billion had behaved like this, and he replied: ‘Because he would have got great pleasure from exploiting a weakness in the system, making him feel as though he had outwitted it.’ The taxpayer – who funded those expenses – could go hang.

This attitude is also true of Joseph Molloy. His defence lawyer, seeking mercy, said of the fraud that ‘no one from the public was made to suffer and a large private company was the victim’.

As if HSBC would have regarded someone defrauding its own shareholders as a lesser class of crime! But, as it happens, Southeastern Railway has, since 2021, been state-owned and operated. So all of us taxpayers are Joseph Molloy’s victims.

No wonder he fled from the court wearing a balaclava.