Accounting ban for boss of TransTec
The chief executive of Geoffrey Robinson's bust and fraud-tainted motor-parts company TransTec has been thrown out of the accountancy profession for his part in the financial reporting scandal.
Richard Carr was today barred from the Institute of Chartered Accountants for misconduct of "a serious and sustained nature". Finance director Richard Parkin was severely reprimanded for "a serious dereliction of duty" in the cover-up of an $18 million black hole in TransTec's accounts.
Their disciplining ends almost a decade of investigations into the firm, which collapsed with the loss of 4000 jobs, £100 million in debt and ended or blighted several executives' careers.
Robinson, the company's founder, left TransTec in 1997 to become Paymaster-General in the new Labour Government just as events leading to the cover-up began to unfold. He was cleared of any role in the scandal. Carr was previously banned as a director for nine-and-a-half years despite being cleared of fraud in a 2006 court case.
That case saw another TransTec finance director, Bill Jeffrey, convicted of fraud. Parkin has also already been disqualified from acting as a director.
Two other accountants have been been barred over the affair while the company's auditor, PricewaterhouseCoopers, was hit with £1.5 million of penalties.
Carr and Parkin were found guilty by the profession's Joint Disciplinary Tribunal of deliberately covering up TransTec's failure in 1996 to produce cylinder heads of a proper quality for Ford. When Ford agreed $18 million of damages, TransTec passed off the compensation as "cost contributions" and hid the outflow of cash as "tooling costs".
