A company director from London, who made some £50,000 false VAT claims to HMRC, has been hit with the maximum director disqualification of 15 years following an Insolvency Service investigation into claims of currency frauds
Olusegun Adigun was director of two companies. Samuel & Associates Ltd was set up in August 2006 and was placed into compulsory liquidation on the petition of a private company in August 2013. The grounds for the winding up were failure to pay £45,143 for the purchase of €50,000.
EU-Africa Business Consult, was incorporated in January 2012 and was placed into compulsory liquidation on the petition of another private company in July 2013, following similar misbehaviour leading to a judgement in the Northampton County Court in November 2012 for £6,940.
The Insolvency Service said that Adigun used his companies to deliberately make false VAT repayment claims from HMRC and then mislead currency dealers into handing over tens of thousands of euros and US dollars to his companies without paying them, except to some degree with money he had already falsely obtained from HMRC.
Each company was registered at virtual office spaces, effectively dead letter boxes misleadingly presented as trading addresses and from which Adigun failed even to arrange collection of mail.
Following the winding up of each company Adigun failed to co-operate with the Official Receiver or provide any defence of his actions.
The Insolvency Service investigation found that between 1 August 2010 and 30 June 2013 HMRC paid Samuel & Associates Ltd £41,453 in VAT repayments based on false claims. Adigun subsequently failed to provide HMRC with any records evidencing the validity of the claims, which totalled £51,983.96. The money has not been repaid.
The investigation found that Adigun used some of the money ‘reclaimed’ from HMRC to make purchases from currency dealers but subsequently provided details of bank accounts in Georgia and Latvia to receive further monies from the dealers, whom he provided with differing UK bank details to claim their amounts owed via direct debit.
Those accounts were left without funds to honour the dealer’s claims meaning €90,000 was lost in the case of Samuel & Associates Ltd and $10,000 to Eu-Africa Business Consult. Of this money, €30,000 was obtained post liquidation by using the Latvian bank account to receive monies ordered in the name of the UK version of Samuel & Associates Ltd, but paid to a Latvian company using the same name.
