PS: Early days still, and he may pay in the end, but in case he does not
- any advice of further steps that I can take to make him re-think? I/we have taken it this far - we might as well push a little further if needed.
Tell him it's to Big Mick down the road.
It doesn't cost a lot more to get a warrant from the High Court. You can then get the HC Sheriffs involved, and they have more powers than the bailiffs.
Steal his van. Or its contents.
And hold it as security against his debt. That's almost legal. Especially if you and a mate swear blind he gave the van (or the tools inside it) to you as security aginst what he owes you.
Can you do that post hoc? I thiougfht you had to take the case to the hgh court in the first place?
FSVO of "often". An average of 1,300 disqualification orders a year over the past 5 years. That's out of 4 million companies.
(Figures from Companies House: management information tables & Companies register activities)
A Ltd has become far less bulletproof with time. Especially where a director can be shown to have been negligent, the courts can chase them personally, and also bar them from holding directorships in the future.
Many of the dodgy businesses will try to circumvent this by "fronting" - i.e. picking some minimum wage individual off their shop floor, and signing them up as a director in name only. The real people calling the shots keeping out of the official record. It works even better if the figurehead does not speak or read english, and can be instructed to just "sign here". Then when it all crashes and burns, they can more easily do a phoenix job with a new set of directors.
Yes
Last year I watched part of one of those programmes that followed a team of bailiffs. According to the programme what many people now do is transfer the county court judgement to the High Court for enforcement as the bailiffs there have more powers.
In principle, yes. But the number of cases pursued is tiny.
Yes, the director doesn't even need to be UK resident. And it can be difficult to prove someone is a "shadow director".
On 12:07 31 Oct 2018, JoeJoe wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@brightview.co.uk:
Kudos to you for following this through but how many hours do you think it has taken?
Apart from the satisfaction of nailing a "bad guy", what have you got out of it?
Should recover around 85-90% of the money lost (assuming he pays).
I agree about the effort involved - definitely cannot be justified in monetary terms.
Since you asked... Main driver for seeing it through was teenage daughter. She was highly unimpressed when I told her, very early on, that we were probably going to let him get away with it because: 1. we can afford to; and 2. we don't have the time/energy to do what it takes. She was most concerned that by not taking him on he would do it next to someone who couldn't afford the loses and/or won't have the time/know how/etc to take him on (e.g. an old granny). Since she agreed to help (and she did), I thought that it would be a good lesson for her (which I believe that it was).
PS: as this was my first ever interaction with the legal system it was quite interesting to see, first hand, how it works (very very slowly if nothing else...). The judge , a prominent QC, was also very impressive.
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