Utopia Traction boss loses appeal to win back licence
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By Roger Brown
GRIMSBY-BASED haulier Utopia Traction, which had its O-licence revoked after being found to be a front for disqualiied operator Martin Graves, has lost an appeal to get it back.
In an Upper Tribunal hearing, Judge Michael Brodrick also upheld the April written decision of the Deputy Trafic Commissioner (DTC) for the Eastern area to disqualify Utopia director Trevor Westield for three years. Utopia Traction, which was granted an O-licence in May 2007, ran three vehicles.
A public inquiry (PI) was called in March after the business failed to inform the DTC’s ofice that it had been ined £2,000 in June 2010 for failing to produce tachograph record sheets, driver cards or a hard copy of electronically stored data.
Utopia transport manager Carla Westield told the PI the business hired vehicles on a weekly basis from a company called Felixstowe Logistic Services (FLS).
Graves, who ran FLS, had been disqualiied following a corporate manslaughter case involving a business he was associated with, in which a man had been killed because a driver had not taken enough rest.
Trevor Westield said he became aware last year that Graves had been disqualiied as an operator.
However, Judge Brodrick said that there had been a “classic case of fronting”.
Judge Brodrick said: “The reality, in our view, is that the majority of the important decisions were taken by Martin Graves, or those he employed, and that Mr and Mrs Westield were simply being used to give an air of respectability to an operation that would never have been granted an operator’s licence of its own.”