I was surprised that the story about Mr Greg Hutchings, the now ex-chief executive of the UK engineering firm Tomkins, didn't really make any impact on this side of the Irish sea.

I suppose we have plenty of misdemeanours of our own to worry about without taking a peek at someone else's, but people are always interested in seeing behind the boardroom doors and the Hutchings lifestyle certainly seemed worth a bit of voyeurism.

Tomkins is not a company I have had any dealings with. Which is a surprise, because my equity portfolio has more than its complement of dismal shares and the performance of Tomkins over the past few years has been dismal in the extreme. (When it comes to shares, by the way, friends are always advised to do what I say and not what I do -

they end up much better off.) Anyway, while Tomkins was going through a nightmare and underperforming the FTSE index by about 75 per cent, Mr Hutchings was happily living the life that most chief executives seem to think they are entitled to. He was, in fact, setting new standards in executive lifestyles with trips to the Caribbean, the use of private jets, a few choice residences in London and a Rolls-Royce at his disposal, all, naturally, paid for by his company.

Personally, I think RollsRoyce's are pretty naff, especially in blue, which is the colour that Greg chose, but maybe you get to an age where you think they really are the ultimate status symbol.

The problem was that Mr Hutchings seemed to believe that, simply because he was the chief executive, everything about his life should have been paid for by his company. And I think he did believe that Tomkins was his company. Not the shareholders' company. It is a distinction that many chief executives fail to notice.

I think it starts to happen when you go on business trips. For anyone who doesn't go on a business trip the whole thing seems incredibly glamorous.

You stay in the kind of hotel you wouldn't dream of staying in if you were paying for it yourself, you can hop in and out of taxis as the mood takes you and you don't have to worry about anything because it's all taken care of by the company.

There is no doubt that there is an allure about having everything paid for, but it usually wears off - after all, how many little bottles of vodka can you consume from the mini-bar on an overnight trip? (OK, maybe that wasn't the best question to ask.)

The truth is that when you are working you don't really have time to rack up ridiculous expenses, although I do know of cases where people have brought their laundry with them to have it done at the hotel overnight, or where items from the hotel's shop have been charged to the room. I've charged items from the hotel shop to the room too - usually Newsweek and Time because I always forgot to bring something to read on business trips.

Confessing to charging two magazines is pathetic - truth is, the only item I was ever tempted to buy on a trip abroad was a diamond ring but I have a feeling somebody might have questioned an extra £1,500 on the bill.

The cases I'm really thinking of are the guy who charged a pair of trousers - and they weren't an inexpensive pair of trousers either, we're talking designer labels here - and the girl who charged the fluffy white bathrobe.

There is a part of me that understands the mindset though. When you are away and sitting on your own in a hotel room, no matter how nice it is, you feel entitled to something more from life than room service and Sky News on the TV. There are other things you can do, of course, but I'll leave those to your imagination.

Some executives, however, just can't switch off the "pamper me" mode even when they're at home. In fact, what happens is that they feel they're giving their whole lives to their companies and they should be rewarded handsomely as a result. Their view is that their family life suffers because of their stressful job and they need to be compensated for it.

Many secretaries and personal assistants, of course, spend half their time actually organising their bosses' family lives. I know lots of female secretaries who are regularly dispatched to Brown Thomas to pick up a bottle of perfume or "something nice" for the chief executive's wife. Really. It still happens. Though whether those particular gifts are from the company or the husband is open to question.

Then there is the issue of the phone bills and, in some cases, security. If an executive spends a lot of time on the phone from home then it's likely the company will pay the telephone bill. If he or she is important enough, the company may well decide to pay for a security system for the house. And if the security system means that the wallpaper has to come down or that the carpets have to come up or that a wall has to be damp-proofed . . . it's a never-ending story.

Some executives get so used to this that they see nothing wrong in billing the company for whatever they want. In Mr Hutchings' case this included extravagant parties, his wife and housekeeper on the payroll and very generous donations to the sports clubs of which he was a member.

Of course part of the problem for Hutchings was that he misled shareholders about the extent of his benefits and so, once they were discovered, he had no option but to resign. Nevertheless, I am certain that he's not the only chief executive of a publicly quoted company who believed that it was OK to bill it for whatever he wanted.

However, his downfall was being plotted, in any event, by some of the UK fund managers who were, understandably, unhappy with the share's performance and who had already written to him to express their disappointment. And it is good to see that fund managers do, eventually and sometimes, take a real interest in what is happening to their shareholdings in companies rather than sighing deeply and shoving them into one of the older managed funds and hoping things will turn out right in the end.

It hasn't turned out all right in the end for Tomkins and it seems that the company will be broken up and sold off. Mr Hutchings is considered unemployable. Maybe he can spend some time considering his future in his holiday home in Portugal. He'll have to pay for the flights himself, though. Who knows, maybe he can afford to buy the London apartments and RollsRoyce at a later date.