The news that two innocent missing bureaucrats may have inadvertently been taken hostage in Canary Wharf and sentenced to 12 years of FSA Regulation was greeted with alarm by their families, human rights groups and UN officials.
The isolated regulator's employment conditions are widely regarded as some of the harshest in the world, with a shadowy network of labour camps spread across all fifteen of their floors, estimated to hold literally hundreds of critically depressed wasters and other political prisoners, a few criminals and probably some sex offenders.
Most analysts believe the latest 2 recruits, will be held in relatively good conditions, to be used as bargaining chips by the London-based feckless wasters.
But if their worst fears are realised and they are sent to a regulation team, or the Edinburgh office to serve their sentences of "reform through labour", they can expect overwork, starvation rations, arbitrary beatings and inadequate shelter, according to former staff-members who have fled the harsh regulation regime.
Many of the FSA teams are located at mines, quarries or factories where the staff are forced to work long hours in dangerous conditions, says a former inmate.
He says the survival rate in the teams is very low, with many assessors dying in their first three years of service.
A former guard in Edinburgh says staff "are treated not as human beings but as animals by their managers".
Staff are beaten by the guards on a regular basis, he says, for minor violations such as resting without the guards' approval, neglecting to bow before a guard or trying to regulate a medium-sized financial institution.
But staff members who have been held in the Teams have mixed descriptions of their experiences.
One individual was accused of shoddy assessments after being found swimming in the afternoon after a firm visit.
He spoke little of his experience, his father said, only to say that he was treated humanely but the food was bad. He reportedly wrote a letter to his mother saying he was moved from one side of the office to the other repeatedly.
He was freed after 90 days when a manager from another floor negotiated his release, but he committed suicide one month after being freed having been unable to get to grips with the utter futility of what he had been doing for 90 days.
Another member of staff spent two years in what he described as a damp uncomfortable cell on the 15th Floor, although he found the gents' toilets to be very similar to a Victorian Slopping Out room in the Shadwell debtors' prison.
He said he was kept under constant surveillance, but never tortured and was given three hot meals a day, albeit after the staff had urinated and spat into them.
"The treatment I received was more humane than I expected," he told the Financial Times shortly after his release, but added that he constantly worried the guards might decide to kill him or make him work on even more spread sheets.
Another former staff-member describes how he was kept without trial for a year in a cramped, dirty and damp cell in the Small Firms Division and was given dirty bread and watery vegetable soup to eat.
He was taken to a work team on the Northern Rock Unit and kept in an unheated cell where his feet became frostbitten, however this was still not as bad as when he had to man phones in the regulator's call centre.
For now we understand that the missing civil servants are being held on the 15th Floor , where Sweden's ambassador to London, Sven Adultboox, has been able to visit them.
The ambassador provided few details of the meeting, but he has been "in constant contact with the FSA's Human Resources team and is constantly pressing them for more information about these two brilliant young bureaucrats," said a UN hostage negotiator today.
The Swedish Mission in Canary Wharf told officials that the hapless staff-members were being held in a "good place" with decent food and medical care, said Hans Blix today.
And in a rare telephone call recently, one of the missing members of staff described her confinement as "bearable".
She was nervous about the possibility, he added, of being transferred to Edinburgh or at having to do two months of actual work. One human rights expert stated that while the civil servants were liable to have some chance at seeing sunlight, and may even get the odd call home "The isolation and depression that FSA staff experience once they realise that they are universally despised is a grave consideration."
