http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews...name_page.html
A BOSS cost 170 workers their jobs after fleecing his company to keep a high-class call girl and two other mistresses.
Married Peter Lee, 51, took his firm to the wall to pay for £1,000-a-night sex sessions with "Sultry Tia".
He bought her a £30,000 BMW car and bedroom furnishings, and took her on exotic holidays to Bali in a £493,000 spree over four years.
The £125,000-a-year managing director also kept two mistresses. One fell pregnant with his child.
But his firm, Durham Travel Services, could not sustain the losses.
A respectable businessman who advised Government ministers on transport issues, Lee is due to appear before Durham crown court next Friday to be sentenced for theft, false accounting and forgery.
Yesterday he refused to comment.
One source said: "He was obsessed with Tia and kept on dipping into the accounts to pay for his fantasies. He's ruined and he could go to jail."
Lee spotted 5ft 8in Tia, said to be in her mid-20s, on a website for escorts, where she is pictured in revealing poses.
It says she is "full of fun" but warns: "Beware, you might become addicted!"
He visited her on trips to London. Between 1998 and 2002 he siphoned £600,000 from company accounts to fund his secret lifestyle.
His international firm, which ran bus and coach operations, turned over £4.6million in 1999 - but Lee worked his way through the profits.
When his wife Ann discovered his double life last year, she moved out of their home in Bishop Auckland, County Durham, with their children Michael, 23, and teenager Robin.
And Eric Bowerbank, his business partner of 14 years, said: "I, like others, feel utterly betrayed. Because of this I lost the business I'd worked hard to build up. I lost my livelihood."
Lee was a former Confederation of Passenger Transport local chairman and a member of the national Disabled Transport Access Committee.
Mr Bowerbank added: "Whatever I thought of him as a person, I, and many others in our industry got it wrong."
One worker said: "He was a brilliant boss. We were all gobsmacked when we found out."
Lee was rumbled in an audit in the summer of 2002. Police were called in and soon after the firm went into liquidation.
A takeover saved 70 jobs but among those sacked were staff running a bus call-out service for the elderly and disabled.