A Co Antrim man has been banned from serving as a company director for seven years after he misused a Covid-era loan.
Samuel Charles Rodgers, who is 61 and from Woodlawn Court in Carrickfergus, made a disqualification undertaking connected to his former company Electric Air Limited.
It was an air-and-spacecraft repair and maintenance company based in the town and was incorporated in February 2015.
Mr Rodgers was the sole shareholder of the company. In the last accounts filed before it entered liquidation, it had current assets of £13,000.
At the time the company was liquidated in July 2021, it had an estimated deficiency as regards members of £14,282.
The Carrickfergus man was given the ban due to the misuse of a Covid bounce-back loan from the Bank of Ireland.
He was found to have falsely inflated the company’s annual turnover from the true figure of £36,000 to £50,000, in order to claim almost £4,000 more in the loan.
Covid bounce-back loans were a scheme run by the British Business Bank (BBB) during the pandemic, in order to support businesses hit by lockdown’s interruption to regular trading.
Businesses could apply for up to 25% of the value of their turnover in a loan, with the upper limit being £50,000.
The Department for the Economy found that Mr Rodgers caused or permitted company funds and the loan to “pay himself a significant increase in salary”, at a time when the company owed thousands of pounds to creditors.
If he had not increased his salary, he would have been able to repay the company’s creditors in full.
As a result of this misconduct, Mr Rodgers made a disqualification undertaking for seven years, preventing him from serving as a company director in that time.
Director’s disqualifications are legal instruments used when the department believes someone has “abused the privilege of limited liability status through negligence, incompetence or lack of commercial probity.”
An undertaking has the same legal force as a order, however, they can be made by people facing disqualification in order to avoid a court hearing.
Cases of six to ten years are reserved for what the department describes as “cases which do not merit the top bracket” of 10 to 15 years.