At a public inquiry on 20 April, West Midlands traffic commissioner Nick Denton heard that Tony Brookes, director of TMB International (Haulage), failed to inform the regulator that the company had entered liquidation and he continued to operate vehicles after the company had ceased trading.
The traffic commissioner also heard that TMB’s vehicles had been issued with 13 prohibitions for mechanical defects over a five-year period and one of the company’s drivers had falsified records on several occasions.
A DVSA investigation was prompted by a stop on 11 August 2016 in Harwich Docks. The driver of the vehicle, Guthran Samra, had no tachograph card.
The examiner identified that Samra was typically removing his card towards the end of his shift but continuing to drive, so attempting to disguise insufficient daily rest. In one instance, his driver card showed he took almost nine hours’ rest at the end of a shift, but his actual rest was just over four hours.
Denton remarked: “This is a case where the director of the company clearly buried his head in the sand when it came to his operator licence responsibilities.
“He should have been downloading the vehicle unit data and running missing mileage reports to make sure his drivers were working within the rules. However, the company had no means of downloading from the vehicle tachograph unit and didn’t know how to perform downloads.
“This failure led to a driver deliberately making false records and not taking sufficient daily rest – a danger to road safety.
“Mr Brookes must also have known what liquidation meant for his business and that he would be operating vehicles illegally after that time. The operator’s licence was held in the name of the limited company so no other entity was authorised to operate under the licence.”