In English company law, the minimum officers of a company are the director and the company secretary, and in small businesses those are the only two employees you’ll have (often in these cases the company secretary will be a relative of the director).
If the company is big enough to need more than one director, then the big cheese is the “managing director”, though sometimes it’s the “chairman of the board” and the managing director does all the work of running the company while the chairman decides strategy (or something).
From context, this looks like one of those small companies that have only one director, and to whom £40,000 is probably a sizable portion of the company’s officers’ wages (in these parlous times, maybe all of it). So I can see why they and the police would have been keen to get the money back rather than write it off.
And in the vernacular, one would say, “two-penny-worth” or “tupenny-worth”.
