I had worked for a prominent charity for seven years when our CEO retired. Her replacement wanted to appoint friends into the senior positions, and wilfully alienated senior and middle management.

I had developed a sophisticated accounting system, which fed all the data into Excel, generating the management accounts, statutory accounts and lead schedules.

In the run up to the day that the entire senior management team left the organisation, I brought the books up to date (four weeks before the year-end) and did a full handover to my successor. Because I am a professional and take pride in my work.

I hear that four months later, my replacement deferred the audit because he hadn’t completed the last four weeks of the year’s accounts. He didn’t really understand Excel, or the accounting system. He was let go.

The new CEO, having lost/shed her entire senior management team, was unable to win over middle management, who were as unhappy with her cronyism as we had been. Within six weeks, she was fired on the spot and marched out of the office. Her number two, who was on holiday, was told not to return.

In the space of around 18 months, a great charity - an exemplar of best practice - was trashed. Three years later, it finally finished running down its reserves, but it didn’t wind up in a dignified manner: it somehow contrived to spend a load of money it didn’t have. Staff were suddenly dumped out on their ear just before Christmas and left out of pocket by £¼m of notice/holiday pay and a supplier (a one man band) was stiffed for £140k.

You might think that, having alerted the Trustees about what was going on, I would feel smug about being proved right. But I feel terribly sad for my former colleagues who lived through this car crash. Karma may have caught up with the CEO, but the collateral damage was widespread.