A partner and his firm have been ordered to pay over £16,000 for refusing to provide documents required for part of a pensions scam investigation.
At Brighton Magistrates’ Court, Solicitor Anthony Wilson and the London-based firm Ashley Wilson Solicitors pleaded guilty to refusing to hand over documents without reasonable excuse.
Relating to a property, the documents were linked to somebody involved in a pension scam investigation. Despite receiving requests for almost nine months, Wilson had still failed to provide them.
The Pensions Regulator stated that neither Wilson nor the firm was associated with the investigation and that there was nothing to indicate that during dealings with the property, the staff had done anything wrong.
However, the documentation was only obtained only when the Pensions Regulator acquired a search warrant of the firm’s offices during May 2016.
Having brought the case, the Pensions Regulator state that this is its first secured criminal conviction.
District Judge Christopher James stated that the information notices, as an important enforcement tool for the Regulator, had been used appropriately.
Wilson was ordered to pay a fine of £4,000 by Judge James, in addition to £7,500 in costs. Ashley Wilson Solicitors was ordered to pay a £2,700 fine as well as costs of £2,500.
Commenting on the case was the Pension Regulator’s executive director of frontline litigation, Nicola Parish. She stated: “Our staff received a series of woeful excuses rather than the information they had requested. This was a case of the company refusing to comply with the law. Legal action could have been avoided if Wilson or someone else at the firm had simply handed over the documents, as they should have done because the information had already been retrieved from storage.”
