The BBC reports investment bank Citigroup has suspended a senior trader allegedly accused of stealing food from the staff canteen, media reports say.
The trader, Paras Shah, is reported to have been earning more than £1m a year including bonuses.
He was removed from his post as head of high-yield bond trading for Europe, the Middle East and Africa last month, the Financial Times reported.
Citigroup has refused to make any comment on the allegations.
According to reports, Mr Shah, aged 31, was suspended following allegations that he helped himself to sandwiches from the canteen at the bank’s London headquarters in Canary Wharf.
It is not clear how many times this happened or over what period of time the alleged behaviour occurred.
This ranks up there with the great maple syrup theft in Canada a couple of years ago.
Josh Hafner of USA Today reports a Texas juvenile center employee confessed to stealing shipments of fajitas over nine years, a district attorney said, a theft totaling $1.2 million.
The Tex-Mex mystery unfolded on Aug. 7 when an 800-pound delivery of fajitas arrived at the Cameron County Juvenile Justice Department in San Benito, The Brownsville Herald reported, about 10 miles north of the Mexico border.
There was only one problem, a kitchen staffer told the delivery driver: The department didn’t serve fajitas. That’s when the driver said he had been delivering fajitas to the center for nearly a decade, District Attorney Luis V. Saenz said.
“If it wasn’t so serious, you’d think it was a Saturday Night Live skit,” Saenz told the Herald. “But this is the real thing.”
The kitchen staffer told her supervisor about the call, and the missing piece fell into place: Gilberto Escamilla, a department employee, had taken that day off. When confronted at work the next day, he confessed to stealing fajitas for the past nine years, Saenz told the newspaper.
Officers later searching his home found fajitas in the refrigerator. Escamilla made bail following his firing and arrest, but a trail of invoices and vouchers led investigators to the shockingly spicy conclusion: Escamilla’s fajitas fraud totaled $1,251,578, per the Herald.
“He would literally, on the day he ordered them, deliver them to customers he had already lined up,” Saenz said.
Josh Hafner of USA Today reports Toronto-area police announced Friday that they had arrested suspects tied to a trafficking ring of drugs, stolen cars and a truckload of the rich, hazelnutty goodness that is Nutella.
“Yes, I said Nutella,” confirmed Det. Sgt. Paul LaSalle, per the Toronto Star.
An elaborate sting dubbed “Project Cyclone” resulted in York Regional Police divvying 137 charges between 23 suspects, the Star reported, including 60-year-old Balwinder Dhaliwal – the so-called “King of Car Thieves” once profiled on the History channel’s Mastermind series.
In the process, police recovered stolen goods totaling roughly 3.75 million U.S. dollars, including 60 vehicles, $149,000 worth of loose cash and assorted amounts of heroin and cocaine. Also found: a trailer chock-full of that creamy spread of the gods, Nutella.
LaSalle said he wasn’t surprised by the stash of chocolatey breakfast bliss, which amounted to about $16,300 in U.S. currency.
“I’ve never seen an investigation that did spiral into so many directions,” he said, according to the Star.
A spike in car thefts led to the investigation beginning in 2015, around the time that a new body shop named Benefit Motors opened in the nearby suburb of Vaughan.
Police grew suspicious of the business and eventually tracked two luxury cars to the shop that were left running in the same driveway to warm up, YorkRegion.com reported.
Police said the thieves targeted mostly luxury cars from brands such as Lamborghini, Maserati and Porsche. Once stolen, the thieves made fake papers for them and changed their identification numbers before reselling them, authorities explained.
“If someone in the criminal world wanted a cheap and nice ride, they came to see the Dhaliwals,” LaSalle said, according to the Star.
Unloading the filched Nutella proved a less complicated affair: Thieves sold the jars of nutty blessedness for about half their market value, YorkRegion.com reported.
The only time my bike ever got stolen – or picked up – was after I left it for four days outside the plant agriculture building at the University of Guelph.
Those four days?
That’s another story.
The inventors of SkunkLock say they were so sick of having their cycles stolen, they decided to give robbers a taste of their own medicine.
Daniel Idzkowski from San Diego realized there’s pretty much no solution to the problem of bike theft because you can cut through nearly every type of lock in a matter of seconds. So he decided to fill a U-Lock with a cannister of smelly gas instead.
“It’s pretty much immediately vomit inducing, causes difficulty breathing… A lot of similar symptoms to pepper spray.”
The lock hasn’t been tested out on thieves yet but Idzkowski and Skunklock co-founder Yves Perrenoud say their own experiments have shown the gas “makes 99% of people puke.”
Someone is stealing avocados in New Zealand. Not just picking a handful to make guacamole for a picnic, but driving up to orchards in the dark of night, using rakes to sweep hundreds from trees, collecting them in blankets and driving off to sell them illegally at road stands, grocery stores and small restaurants in Auckland, according to police.
The problem appears to be one of surging demand and short supply, avocado industry officials say. Traditionally, the soft green fruit have been grown largely for export, but local consumers have been rapidly acquiring a taste for them — just as heavy rainfall in neighbouring Australia badly damaged last year’s harvest. As a result, the price has more than tripled, reaching as high as $NZ6 per avocado ($5.70 in Australian dollars) and fuelling a spate of stealth robberies by enterprising thieves.
“It’s an easy way to make a quick buck, but I don’t think we are dealing with a sophisticated or highly organised operation here, more opportunistic,” Jen Scoular, chief executive officer of New Zealand’s avocado association, was quoted as saying in the Guardian on Wednesday. Officials said there have been dozens of thefts. In the most recent incident, police said, midnight bandits liberated 350 avocados from an orchard in the Bay of Plenty area on the country’s north island.
Police warned that anyone handling or eating the purloined pears may be facing a health risk, because those that have been recently sprayed with pesticides could carry toxins on their skins. No violence or confrontations have been reported in connection with the crime wave, but Scoular said many growers are installing automatic light and alarm systems to protect their lucrative crops.
Provincial police say the 43-year-old suspect surrendered to police on Friday in Joliette, about 50 kilometres north of Montreal.
He will appear in court on Monday.
Earlier this week the man’s 36-year-old brother was also arrested and arraigned in connection with the theft.
Police suspect the accused also made off late last month with 180 hives belonging to Jean-Marc Labonte, who estimated the value of everything stolen at $200,000.
Police are looking for the the maroon-colored Freightliner cab, license plate number F4475N, and trailer, plate number 0753CP, which were stolen while parked at the intersection of Pinkney and Hutchinson avenues at about 12:15 p.m. on Sept. 1, police said.
“It’s disgusting behaviour,” the park’s farm manager Peter Maxwell said on Tuesday after returning from a flock headcount.
“Thirty ewes have gone missing in the past month, all pregnant, some carrying two or even three lambs.
“To think that there are people out there targeting these animals, rounding them up and presumably killing them for food, is very distressing.”
Police are working with Cornwall Park management after a series of incidents over the past few weeks during which sheep rustlers have used dogs and traps to round up and capture sheep after dark.
Last Wednesday passers-by disturbed three men and three large dogs capturing newborn lambs.
“One of the dogs was standing on a lamb and the men were working to round up the sheep,” Mr Maxwell said.
“This is difficult work so it’s obviously highly planned.”
Who steals hamburger, or mince as they call it down here?
A man and a woman drove off with 100kg of mince from Westmeat meat suppliers in Christchurch after a new staff member loaded it into their car about 3pm on Saturday.
The staff member, in his late 20s, thought the customer had paid for the haul.
The theft was the latest in a string of thefts from Westmeat had suffered recently.
Store manager Hayden Soper said the shop had been targeted by four organised criminals “virtually stealing to order” about four or five times, two months ago.
The thieves had made off with filet steaks hidden beneath trenchcoats and in suitcases.
But Soper suspected Saturday’s theft was opportunist.
He did not recognise the pair on the CCTV footage. “They didn’t look rough”, he said.
For reasons unbeknownst to me, we arrived home from swimming and Amy decided to put collars on the cats.
With bells.
She and the kid disappeared upstairs, leaving me to prepare our lunch of pork loin chops with a mixed berry sweet-and-sour sauce, stir-fried veggies and long-grain brown rain.
Unbeknownst to her, the cats almost ended up elsewhere.
The gang stole between four and six cats each night for two years, police in Vinh City said on Friday. They sold a kilogram of cat for $US3, and used the money to play online games, police said.
Although dog thefts are common in Vietnam, this is the first time a group of people have been arrested for stealing such a large number of cats.
The head of the gang, 26-year-old Nguyen Duc Dung, told police they caught the animals by baiting traps with pieces of fish and leaving them outside homes where they knew people kept cats.
Angry locals alerted the police after their pets continued to go missing. The men were caught red-handed as they tried to catch more cats.
Cat meat is a popular delicacy in some parts of Vietnam, usually eaten barbecued as a snack and served with rice wine.
The trader, Paras Shah, is reported to have been earning more than £1m a year including bonuses.
