Director sentenced for major accounting failures
A Stoke-on-Trent director has been sentenced, after failing to keep accounting records for his business.
Colin Hulme, 44, from Stoke-on-Trent, was the sole director of KDM & Sons, which bought and sold PlayStations, mobile phones and computer hard drives, from April 2016 until the company went into liquidation in 2017.
Following the company’s closure, Hulme failed to deliver sufficient company records to either the liquidator of the Insolvency Service to explain how the business had failed or even when it had ceased trading.
Hulme had claimed that he’d handed over three boxes of books and records to the liquidator’s offices in Sutton Coldfield, yet there was no record of this delivery.
This meant investigators were unable to establish whether deposits of approximately £2,218,300 into the company’s bank account between June 2016 and June 2017 were from genuine sales of electronic equipment, nor whether outgoings of around £2,236,800 from the same account were legitimate business expenditures.
KDM & Sons also owed £2,776,209 in tax at the end of November 2016, which has never been paid. Investigators were unable to decipher if Hulme owed more in tax or whether there were any recoverable assets to pay back creditors.
Hulme was sentenced to 12 months imprisonment, suspended for 24 months, at Stoke Crown Court. He will also have to undertake 150 hours of unpaid work in addition to his sentence and pay £5,000 towards prosecution costs.
The news comes after Hulme accepted a disqualification undertaking from the Secretary of State in August 2019. He was later charged with a breach of the Companies Act 2006 due to the criminal nature of his misconduct and was sentenced by Recorder Macadam.
Julie Barnes, Chief Investigator at the Insolvency Service, said: “Any business owner should ensure they have proper financial record keeping in place, but for directors of limited companies this is a specific legal requirement.
“There are no excuses and as Colin Hulme has discovered, a failure to do so can and will result in a criminal conviction.”
