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Simon English: This cakes story may make you laugh but Luke Johnson is a victim here

Luke Johnson is the chairman of bakery chain Patisserie Valerie: Nigel Howard
Luke Johnson is the chairman of bakery chain Patisserie Valerie: Nigel Howard

It’s easy to laugh at the predicament facing Luke Johnson, perhaps you’d need a heart of stone not to. The caricature of him is of a cocky wide-boy, wheeling and dealing his way to a great fortune, while offering lectures to the rest of us on, among other things, the blight of financial illiteracy and the need to pay attention so we don’t get defrauded.

Those enjoying his present discomfort like to note that he’s a Brexiteer, as if that had something to do with the financial crisis at his cake shops, Patisserie Valerie.

Or perhaps they just think it serves him right. Small minded éclair munchers must be punished for daring to dislike the EU.

In some ways, it is incredible that Johnson didn’t know, until it was too late, the huge gap between what he was told was the state of the business and the true picture.

But assuming it was a fraud rather than incompetence behind the £20 million black hole, that just makes Johnson and his staff the victim of a crime rather than hopeless dolts.

The Serious Fraud Office has now opened a criminal investigation. Assuming they come up with the goods (find the guilty person) well, it’s hard to see that Johnson is to blame or particularly deserving of mockery.

We can assume he’ll lay off on opining quite so freely on the world of business from now on, but that’s actually a shame. Better might be if he kept talking, in particular about what he now knows that he didn’t before.

Reports at the weekend had it that Johnson was warned months ago that he had too many roles at the firm. That being chairman and a member of the audit committee somehow conflicted with being a 37% shareholder.

Glass Lewis and Pirc, the usual corporate governance complainers, would say that Johnson was not an “independent” director.

Well, plainly not. He had more skin in the game than anyone.

Independence partly comes from having no particular to reason to care what happens at the firm(s) you are supposedly overseeing or advising. Independence can be overrated.

If Johnson had gone into hiding, or refused to put his hand into his wallet to try and put right what went wrong, we’d have yet more reasons to be suspicious of business folk.

Instead, as a friend told the Mail on Sunday: “If Patisserie Valerie hadn’t had a large and very committed shareholder as chairman, 2500 people would have been out of work this weekend.”

For his part, Johnson openly can’t stand Glass Lewis et al, branding them “corporate governance zealots”, comparing the ISS with “eunuchs giving sex lessons”.

He’s unlikely to be so colourful in future and will find it hard to argue that the corporate governance at Patisserie Valerie was in order.

Someone dropped a ricket, even if it wasn’t him. But the whole point about fraud is that it is very difficult to spot until later. The perpetrators are clever, charming, hugely likable even.

A mate of mine runs a firm that, although much smaller than Patisserie Valerie, still puts food on the table for at least six families. A while ago he hired a young whizz kid to go for growth while he stepped back to think more strategically about the future.

No one who met the whizz didn’t like him. He was fun and smart. And a complete charlatan whose main skill seemed to be siphoning off company money to himself. When the truth emerged, it was shocking and painful to everyone who’d worked with him, especially including the boss, who thought the whizz kid was his best friend.

So it’s not impossible to think that Johnson could have been legged over by people he knew very well, and trusted implicitly. In fact, those are the people most likely to get away with it. You tend not to give obvious crooks with a shifty nature the keys to the till.

There’s something rather nasty about wishing Johnson ill here. He’s gobby. There are worse things.