Thu, 31 Jan 2013

The government’s Insolvency Service has handed Gareth Donald Onions, the former director of Solihull business Deltaworld, which provided field staff for merchandising, a five-year disqualification from acting as a company director.

The Insolvency Service found that the firm failed to ensure the payment of a total of £648,137 in Pay As You Earn tax and National Insurance Contributions relating to the staff it supplied to clients.

All but £76,549 related to a period of time during Onions’ directorship of the firm. During this period, one payment of £3,300 for such costs was made to Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs, while Onions received payments totalling £240,000.

Onions had become a director of the company on 1 January 2006, resigning on 15 October 2010. Deltaworld was founded in 1989.

Onions, who was already disqualified from being a director until 2014 for failing to ensure Tigerpark, a company where he was formerly a director, paid its taxes, has given an undertaking to the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills not to promote, manage or be the director of a limited company until 2018.

The Insolvency Service would not comment on whether they are pursuing other directors of Deltabank.

Recruiter was not able to contact Onions, with the Insolvency Service unable to provide a telephone number for him and neither Deltaworld nor Tigerpark having a website.

Claire Entwistle, director of Company Investigations North at the Insolvency Service, comments: “The Insolvency Service will rigorously pursue traders who seek an unfair advantage over their competitors by not paying their PAYE and NIC to the government when they have actually deducted it from employees … [they] should not expect to get away with it.”

• Previous successful investigations by the Insolvency Service into incorrectly-run recruitment businesses include Walsall sales and marketing recruiter The McKenzie Partnership, and a number of Leamington Spa firms.