How is this not a criminal offence?

Why is it not a criminal offence?
From the FT Alphaville, we have the story of Ravi Shankar SInha, the UK CEO of JC Flower's (huge globe-girdling P.E. firm), who ended up losing a lot of money during the financial crisis (poor guy :-(  ).
As any red-blooded human being would do, he set out to rectify the situation, and make back his money.
How?
I'm glad you asked.  What he seems to have done is the following (for context, "Company A" is a company that JCF had invested in)

• He went to Company A, and claimed that they owed him advisory fees.
• He told Company A that JCF had authorized the payment of these advisory fees (after all, he was the CEO.  Why would they disbelieve him?)
• He then sent them invoices for around 1.3 Million Euros (and more!), for these 'advisory fees' (yeah, you guessed it, fake invoices)

The kicker, of course, is that he basically made the whole thing up - there were no advisory fees authorized, and any work he'd done for Company A was all as part of being at JCF, not personal stuff.

In due time he got caught (gory details from the FSA here), and they fined him (as well as took back the money he'd gotten from Company A.


Seriously, how can this not be criminal?  I'm assuming there is some kind of British Law thing going on here (but I'm almost certain there isn't, but hey, I'm not a lawyer).  But come on, this is serious money. We send people to jail for writing $90K of bad checks, but faking invoices for waaay more money - thats ok somehow?


Mind you, I'm with Adam Gopnik who writes in the New Yorker that

For that matter, no social good is served by having the embezzler or the Ponzi schemer locked in a cage for the rest of his life, rather than having him bankrupt and doing community service in the South Bronx for the next decade or two. Would we actually have more fraud and looting of shareholder value if the perpetrators knew that they would lose their bank accounts and their reputation, and have to do community service seven days a week for five years

But I still think of this as criminal, not civil, and for the upper 0.1% (or whatever the heck P.E. CEOs are), these type of penalties should be exceptionally severe - e.g., picking up dog-poop along the Brooklyn waterfront every day, twice a day, for 20 years.