At last the guilty are being brought to justice but they're working

applauds the new get tough on fraudsters policy, but when will those guilty of squandering the life savings of pensioners get theirs?

The Association of British Insurers' last week put out a notice warning anyone tempted to commit insurance fraud, that they could end up in jail.

A garage owner apparently has just been sent down for four years after making bogus motor insurance claims. The crime involved inflating or indeed inventing claims for accident repairs enabling him to pocket a cool (pounds) 900,000.

All dastardly stuff, and I'm certainly in favour of tough punishments for liars, cheats and fraudsters. But what I want to know is when will we see senior executives of insurance companies being banged up, for in some cases presiding over the loss of billions of pounds of their customers' money? Not for a very long time I suspect.

Not, I hasten to add, that there is any top brass from a Scottish company I would like to see doing time. Not an insurance company at least. And I'm sure you won't need to scratch your heads too hard to conjure the names of people I would rejoice to see behind bars.

But I'm not sure small time insurance fraudsters are necessarily among them.

According to a spokesman for the ABI, "Insurance fraud is a crime. It does not matter whether it is a small-scale opportunistic claim, or a well planned large-scale scam. Today, insurance cheats are not only more likely than ever to get caught, but face prosecution, and even a prison sentence."

The examples of insurance cheats they cite include:

lA policyholder, who died in the USA and was buried in Nigeria, but then renewed his motor insurance policy a month after his death.

lA pet owner whose cat went missing and who provided a forged receipt for (pounds) 200 for the cost of advertising for him when the true cost was (pounds) 20.

It seems more likely that such saddos need help rather than jail sentences. If the ABI is right and they should be locked up, shouldn't such rough justice also apply to financial bosses who preside over the snuffing out of large numbers of people's life's savings?

"We couldn't possibly comment," said the ABI.

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