While she readily admitted her guilt, detectives have only managed to “claw back” just over £9,000. The whereabouts of the remainder is not known, although evidence of “overseas assets” was beginning to emerge, Mr Armstrong said.Johnson, from Streatham, south-west London, who admitted one count of theft, showed no emotion as Judge Paul Dodgson spoke of the “tragedy” her presence in the dock represented.”But you have committed a string of serious thefts involving as it did a breach of trust This was fraud on a mammoth scale. You worked for Lloyds TSB and systematically stole from them. You used your skills to conceal these thefts and indeed to create a trail of computer and paperwork that enabled them to be disguised for many, many years.”In doing so, he said, she had to keep a “precise tally” down to the last penny of what she had taken in order to prevent alarm bells ringing. At one stage in the scam she even used her unsuspecting partner’s bank account.Johnson’s secret life of crime, which ended last year, was spent at the bank’s Park Lane and Oxford Street branches in London.. Britain’s biggest building society admitted yesterday it might have to revise its forecast for house prices this year after its research showed the market had continued to grow.

Although this was much slower than December’s 1.9 per cent, the society said the market was buoyant.”Despite pessimistic news from the global economy and the UK manufacturing sector, the housing market is holding up well,” said Alex Bannister, Nationwide’s group economist.He said he was still confident annual growth in house prices would slow from 13.8 per cent last year – the highest since 1988 – to about 6 per cent this year. Most housing market analysts failed to predict last year’s boom.Last month saw the annual rate fall to 11.7 per cent, its lowest since July last year. “With prospects for pay and jobs deteriorating modestly, the housing market will slow during 2002,” Mr Bannister said. “However, the market looks set to remain robust, with prices expected to rise by 6 per cent.”He said that with mortgage rates close to a half-century low, homeowners would be able to sustain their current record levels of debt. The Bank of England base rate, currently at 4 per cent, would have to rise to 10 per cent before homeowners found their mortgage payments anywhere near the levels of the late-1980s boom.But he urged other mortgage lenders not to take advantage of low rates by encouraging borrowers to “overstretch” themselves.

“If lenders stoke the market by relaxing credit conditions, then our forecast that house prices will grow by 6 per cent this year may prove to be an under-estimate,” he said.Last month two mortgage lenders, Alliance & Leicester and NatWest Bank, said they were prepared to lend only 90 per cent of a property’s value in areas where they believed homeowners could be exposed to negative equity if prices crashed.But Simon Rubinsohn, an economist at Gerrard, a City stockbroker, said: “The fact that there was no reverse after the strong increase in December is a testament to the underlying strength of the property market at the present time.”. Government documents uncovered during a man’s search for his lost father have revealed how thousands of Chinese servicemen who served Britain in the Second World War were forcibly repatriated in a climate of anti-oriental racism. But he said: “It doesn’t surprise me that there’s very little in the record. British historians have not really been in interested in the history of small ethnic groups.”The story was uncovered by Keith Cocklin, 55, a retired merchant seaman who began investigating the disappearance of his father, Soong Kwai Sing, just before his own birth in May 1946.

Mr Cocklin, whose work is featured in a BBC North West documentary entitled Shanghai’d, was told his father had returned voluntarily to support the new People’s Republic in China, which was not established until 1949.His plea for information through a BBC local radio programme elicited the testimony of Steve Crawshaw, a former fitter who built bunks in cargo holds to sleep the returning Chinese. There were also witnesses to police raids in which the Chinese men were rounded up “We just saw them getting into the trucks. If they ran, they [the police] ran after them,” one witness, Larry Kee, said.Correspondence with Maria Lin Wong, who had investigated her own father’s disappearance, helped to lead Mr Cocklin to Public Record Office documents demonstrating the haste with which the policy was initiated after an end to Japanese occupation of China removed a key impediment. The documents record the acceptance by the Transport and War Office, in correspondence with Liverpool’s Chief Constable, that the “undesirable” Chinese seamen “try every device to avoid repatriation but once they see that bribery, corruption and solicitors’ letters will not avail, they will accept the inevitable”.Professor Lane said anti-Chinese sentimentflared during the war, when Chinese and Indian merchant seamen took strike action in protest over their pay – a third of that offered to British seamen. “This is the classical outrage of the imperial masters at the imperial subordinates daring to stand up for themselves,” Professor Lane said. “The Chinese were very proud of their own culture and very aware of the negative stereotypes and quite scandalous attitudes some people had towards the Chinese.”Documents supporting repatriation list details of 1,000 convictions for opium smoking, 50 for gaming offences and countless cases of venereal disease and tuberculosis.Mr Cocklin, who said his discoveries had made him want to “declassify” himself as a British citizen, knows his father was shipped to Hong Kong, then onwards to Shanghai on 9 March 1946 on the Ajax.