Sorry late coming back to this but the article very carefully doesn’t state that Winn was an embezzler. Its reports other people accusing her of being embezzler.
As I said, I’ve no idea whether it was incompetent book keeping, succumbing to embezzlement to pay other debts assuming it would be returned (a common pattern in small scale embezzling) or if she is a hardened criminal. That article provides no evidence of the third and the only police action was to “question” - she was never even charged or followed up. Victims don’t make decisions to drop charges, especially with sums of the claimed size. The “smart lawyer” was the loan shark’s smart lawyer not theirs.
Similarly the article strongly implies the illness is faked but carefully doesn’t state that (which would be actionable). It simply says they spoke to consultants who hadn’t seen that pattern of disease. Anyone with an immune/neurological condition (I’m one) will know that patterns of disease vary, accurate diagnosis can be very difficult and opinions from specialists can vary hugely.
Mostly though what made me feel this was very unObserver like was the free pass given to the dodgy deal over the loans. We have a “business man” who gives two people with no funds or means to repay 100k in loans secured on their house, whose solicitor demands NDAs from those involved and then declares bankruptcy relatively soon afterward. I cannot imagine the real Observer investigative team giving him the same sympathetic free pass.
I’ve subsequently heard many “reputable” journalists trotting out “they were faking it” based on that article as their only evidence, despite it being plain many of them haven’t read the article or the book. Journalism is not what it was years ago - competing with clickbait has reduced standards across the board IMO.
I used to be a regular subscriber to the Guardian. I ditched that a couple of years into Viner’s tenure due to the drop in quality of the journalism. I’d only kept subscribing that long as the Observer was still a good investigative paper. I noted how all those reporters were banged out on the last day before the transition to Tortoise.
Tortoise/Bylines were both productions I looked at as alternatives to the Grauniad. Both started well but rapidly became clickbait. Most of the quality investigations appearing in Tortoise have been independently done and sold to Tortoise rather than their own research. I don’t think Tortoise/Bylines are any worse than eg the Daily Mail or Daily Mirror but I don’t take them any more seriously either.