jonttt
Monaco
- Joined
- 20 Aug 2012
- Messages
- 10,581
Re: Director Loan - £334K
DAVIDGT996 said:jonttt said:As a Qualified Accountant running my my own Practice I deal with a few liquidators. The all say trying to enforce the 'shadow' Director activity is extremely difficult and very rarely happens.DAVIDGT996 said:...........
To be fair the government has really been tightening up on this sort of thing ie:
- all transaction taken before liquidation which where made whilst insolvent to the detriment of creditors can be reversed
- a directors ban involves you agreeing to NOT act as a director in any capacity for the period of the ban. Whilst you can hold shares and be a senior manager you cannot make day to day decision on the running of the business. If you do it is a criminal offence. They have, so I've heard on the grapevine, been enforcing this where people have clearly been acting as "shadow" directors whilst banned.
Of course they do :wink:
Like anything in life, you get out of something a direct proportion of what effort you put in. In this context I'm sure if a "pheonix" new business was put in place it would be fairly easy to get evidence of "director" activities of the banned party. With the obvious "interest" of the Porsche community which feels hard done by they would be taking a massive risk in that respect.
There are lots of less formal ways that information can be used in the real world. By way of example often banking is the achilles heal I have used to effectively stop businesses from trading in these situations. The banks are ultra paranoid re AML regs and KYC (Know your customer). Someone would need to falsify declarations to get a new bank account open and source of startup funds (banks now need clear evidence of this). Any suggestion by a friendly word with their compliance teams can result in accounts being frozen without notice where there is evidence of false declarations :hand:
There are other, even more effective things that can be done by a grieved party with a matter of principle to prove (rather than financial reward) to stop these pheonix type creditor avoidance schemes which I'm obviously not going to post on an open forum.
The bottom line is that the Mearns family should pay for their crimes. If that means an "adjustment" to their lifestyle eg smaller house, no foreign holidays then so be it, you make your bed, you lie in it but on the face of it the materiality of the crimes (may be 7 figures over the years) means that there has to be a chance of jail time. The fact that it looks like they have been trading for years on an insolvent basis would be a big factor in that. Even the fact the Mrs Mearns is a "trusted" Cllr and none practising solicitor (as she appears to like to tell everyone) would be important in terms of the severity of the breach of trust.