Roddy Shand, a former chartered accountant and chairman of gentlemen's club Boodle's, has been sent to prison for two years. He pleaded guilty to charges of fraudulent trading, and was sentenced last month at Harrow Crown Court for what the judge described as a loss of judgment of 'what was right and, more importantly, what was wrong'.

Shand admitted withdrawing around £2m in unauthorised loans from his family printing and envelope manufacturing business, Simson Pimm, where he was managing director. The money went to pay off debts after he made a string of unsuccessful investments in the US in the late 1980s, and to meet personal obligations - including his subscription to Boodle's. When he failed to repay the loans, Simson Pimm was forced into administrative receivership and the family-owned holding company, Shenval Holdings, went into liquidation four months later, in July 1993.

The police say that a total of £4m went missing, but Shand's brothers, Alexander and Gordon, put the figure as high as £7m. Shand also owed his mother £1m when she died last year, and his failure to reimburse her apparently deprived her of a pension for the last seven years of her life.

Shand, whose membership of the ICAEW lapsed in 1993 after he failed to pay his subscription, was disqualified from acting as a company director for nine years in 1996.