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15-year disqualification for company director who falsified VAT claims and defrauded currency dealers (25 July 2016)

Date: 25/07/2016
Duncan Lewis, Legal News Solicitors, 15-year disqualification for company director who falsified VAT claims and defrauded currency dealers

A London-based company director who made false VAT claims to Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC) has been disqualified for the maximum time period allowed.

The Insolvency Service investigated 41-year-old company director Olusegun Samuel Adigun and found that, between 1 August 2010 and 30 June 2013, HMRC had paid his company Samuel & Associates Ltd a total of £41,453.96 in VAT repayments, based on false claims submitted by Adigun.

Adigun subsequently failed to provide HMRC with any records to validate the VAT claims made – which totalled £51,983.96 – and the money has not been repaid.

However, the investigation found that Adigun used some of the money “reclaimed” from HMRC to make purchases from currency dealers – he provided details of bank accounts in Georgia and Latvia in order to receive further monies from the dealers, whom he provided with differing UK bank details to claim the amounts owed via direct debit.

The accounts were left without funds to honour the dealers’ claims – meaning that €90,000 was lost in the case of Samuel & Associates Ltd and $10,000 to Eu-Africa Business Consult.

A total of €30,000 of this money was obtained post-liquidation, by using the Latvian bank account to receive monies ordered in the name of the UK company of Samuel & Associates Ltd, but which were paid to a Latvian company using the same name.

The Insolvency Service investigators concluded that Adigun had 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, which were effectively “dead letterboxes” misleadingly presented as trading addresses. However, Adigun failed even to arrange collection of mail from the addresses.

Following the winding up of each company, Adigun also failed to co-operate with the Official Receiver or provide any defence of his actions, said the Insolvency Service.

Following a hearing in the High Court, Registrar Clive Jones ordered that Olusegun Samuel Adigun be disqualified from acting as a company director for 15 years.

Duncan Lewis Business Crime Solicitors

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