The owner of a Wiltshire scrapyard and recycling company has been ordered to pay almost £2 million he made from running an illegal waste site in Melksham.

The original confiscation order was for £2.74 million, but this figure was reduced at Swindon Crown Court following an application to amend the earlier judgement under a legal clause known as the ‘Slip Rule.’  Defence lawyers successfully argued it had been wrong to include a figure for VAT when calculating how much their client had benefited from crime. They also alleged that, in preparing its prosecution, the Environment Agency had mistakenly included invoices for ferrous metals.

The defendant had been warned on several occasions about unlawful waste activities including the illegal disposal of waste on farmland and depositing and processing waste without an environmental permit.

A clothing and textile recycling company has been fined £650,000 and ordered to pay costs of £3,300 after an eighty-nine-year-old worker was fatally injured by a reversing delivery vehicle.

An investigation by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) showed the company had failed to make a suitable and sufficient assessment of the risks arising from vehicle movement. It was custom and practice for vehicles to reverse from the weighbridge, which was also used by employees to access the factory. There were no measures in place to adequately segregate pedestrians from moving vehicles, and there wasn’t a safe system of work in place to ensure that vehicles could manoeuvre safely.

A national manufacturer and supplier of fitted kitchens, appliances and joinery products was fined £1.2 million and ordered to pay costs of £33,902 after a visiting HGV driver was crushed to death at one of the company’s premises when a forklift truck overturned whilst lifting kitchen worktops from the trailer.  The company had failed to implement a safe procedure to ensure that pedestrians were kept at a safe distance during loading and unloading work

A plastic and paper manufacturing company was fined £ 100,000 and ordered to pay costs of £1, 503 after a worker suffered crush injuries from trapping his hand in an unguarded printing machine.  The employee had his hand was drawn into the print rollers while he was attempting to clean the running machine resulting in partial amputation of two fingers.

An investigation by the Health and Safety Executive into the incident which occurred on 5 December 2016, found that the lack of guarding on the machine was the root cause of this incident together with a lack of training and supervision.