Sin Bin: Scots entrepreneur hit with 11-year ban over VAT fraud
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A Scots businessman has been banned from running a company for more than a decade after submitting false VAT returns and taking money out of his payroll and employment agency company to which he was not entitled.
Former lawyer David Allen’s firm went bust with debts of more than £43 million in 2013 and the government’s Insolvency Service began an investigation into the 62 year-old.
They found Mr Allen, who lived in a £1m 17th-century Lanarkshire mansion with its own golf course, filed VAT returns that under-declared Edinburgh-based Work Legal-E’s liabilities by £5m.
Invesigators subsequently discovered that the company had sufficient funds to pay off its debts.
This had been refuted by Mr Allen during a meeting with HM Revenue and Customs in 2013, when he claimed that he had opted to under-declare the liability as he considered the company was “tight on money”.
Also discovered was that Mr Allen had received three unauthorised payments from the company totalling more than £1.6m, but no contractual evidence was found to support the entitlement.
Mr Allen left for Dubai following the collapse of Work Legal-E and his other related companies and has hampered attempts to recover money for creditors.
He accepted an 11-year disqualification order.
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