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Dear Sir,

To claim that this is a victim-less crime and that £250m of "smoothing" is ok or somehow normal is entirely missing the point. Whether meant or not, this massaging of profit numbers could very much constitute fraud.

Tesco is a publicly traded company, and investors (some of which are our pension funds) base their share purchase decisions and dividend expectations based on the information provided by the company. If employees at Tesco deliberately twist the result by a significant degree, then they could cause investors to hold a more optimistic view of Tesco performance (as in this case), when they might otherwise not bought or held shares had they known the true profitability.

The effect of this can be clearly seen in the share price- a huge correction to what one could argue is the right price for the current performance of the company.

Everyone who bought shares the day before this revelation based on mis-represented trading data will rightly feel aggrieved at the deception. It may have cost some millions of pounds.

Whilst I cannot condone the hounding by the press let's be clear- this behaviour had the effect of deceiving investors and the city, and people will need to be held to account.

James Stutger