Four family members who ran a cash collection company have been banned for a combined 32 years for failing to pay millions of pounds to the company’s clients, who included local authorities and charity collections
Doreen, Sean, Joanne and John Baker were all were directors of Coin Co International Plc (Coin Co) based in Burgess Hill, West Sussex, providing cash collections in transit services to local government, public bodies, charities, other organisations and businesses. The company also provided counting and foreign exchange coinage services.
The company was incorporated in January 1995 and its cash-in-transit services were undertaken under agreements which stipulated that the money collected, for example from pay-and-display car parks, was counted, banked and paid over to the customer.
However, Coin Co fell behind with payments of collected funds to clients from at least March 2013, more than a year before it went into administration in November 2014, breaching contracts it had entered into.
At administration, Coin Co had assets of £1,866,066 and liabilities of £11,397,211 and investigators looked at the company’s activities, discovering several instances of mismanagement.
In one case, four different customers were owed £5.8m by Coin Co who had collected funds on their behalf but had not returned the money, directly breaching previous agreements. These monies dated back to collections made from July 2013 onwards, and were due to be paid over between four and ten days after the cash was collected.
The investigation also found that from at least 1 October 2013, when the co-directors were in dispute with a major client over historic sums owed to the company, Coin Co failed to preserve monies collected on behalf of the other clients, instead intermingling monies collected on behalf both of the major client and of the other clients and making payments to the major client from the monies so intermingled.
The directors did not dispute the findings of the investigation, and each has been banned for eight years.
Robert Clarke, investigations group leader at the Insolvency Service said: ‘It is clear that companies handling money on behalf of others have a duty to ensure that funds collected are duly paid over to the rightful owners, under the agreements entered into. Directors who fail in these duties will be investigated and removed from the corporate arena for a lengthy period.’
Report by Pat Sweet
