Melchett
The clerks are going to love you, suggesting that one with just one day left before JPA goes of the air for 2 weeks! Good idea though.
Seriously though, I think you are being hard on your "Execs", whoever they are, by suggesting that they won't let you carry over your excess untaken leave in order to "make themselves look good". The very fact that you will be shown as having lost leave should have just the opposite affect, since it suggests poor leave management, even if that isn't fair. These guys don't make the leave rules. They are bound by JSP 760, which says, in effect, that they can only authorise carry-over of excess untaken leave if there is a reasonable chance of it being taken in the next leave year and that it could not have been taken this year for service reasons. In practice, that means that you have to have booked the leave and had it cancelled, with certification that the cancellation was for service reasons. We all tend to do ourselves no favours by planning leave when we know we are going to be free to take it, whereas the sure-fire way around this problem is to book it for when you want to take it, and then cancel it when you have to. Any Exec worth his salt should understand this and should have no problem with approving your application and then cancelling it. As you say, play the system!
Regards
Ginseng