A skip hire firm has been fined £240,000 after a worker was crushed to death due to poor traffic arrangements at its premises.
Ace Waste Haulage was also ordered to pay more than £51,000 in costs after an investigation into the death of 24-year-old temporary worker Stelian Gaviliuc.
A joint police and HSE investigation found he was crushed under the wheels of a shovel loader just two weeks after starting work at the company.
He had left his picking station at the Neasden site in August 2017 for a lunch break and walked through a processing shed, which was the only way out of the building.
A colleague then saw Gaviliuc under the vehicle and shouted at the driver to stop.
He was taken to hospital but died from his injuries five days later.
The investigation discovered the processing shed had no clearly defined pedestrian route and there was no way to safely communicate with machine operators.
In addition, the rear view mirror of the vehicle which ran Gaviliuc over was not in working condition, and the windows were covered in dust and dirt which restricted visibility.
The Old Bailey also heard that around 18 months before the incident, an unannounced HSE inspection highlighted the unsatisfactory nature of traffic arrangements at the site.
Ace Waste Haulage, which held an operator’s licence specifying up to 20 HGVs out of two operating centres, entered liquidation in 2018.
