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School-run taxi firm hit with £1.5million confiscation order after director’s tax fraud conviction
A school transport operator whose director was jailed after withholding hundreds of thousands of pounds in VAT has been handed a confiscation order worth more than £1.5million.
Berkshire Education Travel Ltd was ordered at Reading Crown Court on Monday 14 September to pay £1,514,056.71, according to information supplied by HM Revenue and Customs. The company has been given three months to pay the confiscation order.
The financial recovery action follows the prosecution of company director David Park, who was sentenced to six years in prison at Reading Crown Court in October 2022 after an HMRC investigation into tax evasion. Park was also disqualified from acting as a company director for seven years.
The case centred on Berkshire Education Travel’s provision of home-to-school taxi services for Bracknell Forest and Wokingham Borough councils. HMRC said Park and the company invoiced the two local authorities for VAT but failed to disclose and pay the money to the tax authority.
According to HMRC’s original case details, £697,809 in VAT was received in connection with work for Bracknell Forest Borough Council, while a further £79,510 was received from Wokingham Borough Council. The offences covered the period between November 2010 and November 2016.
Park and Berkshire Education Travel were jointly charged with two counts of cheating the public revenue and one count relating to transferring criminal property. Both denied the charges but were convicted on all counts following a trial at Reading Crown Court. The jury heard that a substantial proportion of the money paid to the company had been used towards the purchase of a £3.8million property in rural Berkshire.
At the time of Park’s sentencing, HMRC said it intended to pursue recovery of the stolen money through confiscation proceedings. HMRC PR School run taxi boss jailed for tax evasion.docx The £1.514million order now imposed on Berkshire Education Travel represents the latest major financial consequence of the case, almost four years after the criminal sentencing.
Louise MacDonald, HMRC’s Deputy Director for Economic Crime, said in full: “Our work doesn’t stop at conviction – we always look to recover the proceeds of crime, money that should have been used to fund our public services.
“We encourage anyone with information about tax fraud to report it online to HMRC on GOV.UK.”
The confiscation order is substantially higher than the roughly £777,000 in VAT identified in the original prosecution. The information supplied by HMRC does not provide a breakdown explaining how the £1,514,056.71 figure was calculated, so it cannot be assumed that the full amount represents unpaid VAT alone.
The original prosecution followed Park’s arrest on 24 November 2016. He was subsequently convicted by a jury on 2 September 2022 before being sentenced the following month. HMRC said at the time that the withheld tax had deprived public services of money that should have been paid to the Exchequer.
