Two directors of a Devon-based recycling company have been disqualified from holding director positions for 10 years after they obtained a £250,000 loan under false pretences.
Fredrick Bartlett and Clive Tayton, both directors of Bionova Recycling, were banned for 10 years by the Insolvency Service.
A third director, Aaron Custance, was disqualified for eight years, while a three-and-a-half-year ban was imposed on Bartlett’s wife, Marilyn Bartlett.
They have been banned from acting as a director of a company; from being a receiver of a company’s property; and from taking part in the promotion, formation or management of a company or limited liability partnership.
The Okehampton-based operator, which held an O-licence for one vehicle, borrowed £250,000 in 2013 on the condition that it had to put the same amount in matched funding into the business. To give the impression it had done this, the directors borrowed £50,000 from an associate and passed it repeatedly through the company’s bank accounts before paying it back.
The directors then used bank statements showing the multiple payments of the same £50,000, but not the repayment, to persuade the lender that the funding had been put into the business.
The loan comprised funding from public sources, including local authorities, the British Business Bank, central government funds and European funding, as well as private investment funds.
Bionova Recycling went into administration in April 2014 with claims totalling £970,00. The lender never got its money back.
Fredrick and Marilyn Bartlett had been directors at another company, Nergetic Renewables, which had obtained £50,000 from the same lender in a similar manner. It went into liquidation in November 2014.
Sue MacLeod, chief investigator of insolvent investigations, Midlands and West at the Insolvency Service, said: “These are serious cases in which the directors deliberately misled the lender into making loans that it would not have made if it had known the companies’ true positions. The directors made misrepresentations that they had introduced money into the companies when in fact they had not.”
