Tanker's no-show stinger
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• Lichfield-based Tanker Road Services has been ordered to pay fines and costs totalling £38,550 after failing to appear to answer charges that it had failed to produce and preserve tachograph records, and had used vehicles with unsealed tachographs.
'Three of the company's drivers were ordered to pay fines and costs totalling £1,775 after admitting falsifying tachograph charts and a fourth driver, Glyn Griffith of Telford, was committed for trial at Stafford Crown Court after denying falsifying a chart.
Lichfield Magistrates were told that when traffic examiners and police raided the company's premises last November, managing director Robert Taylor claimed that tachograph charts for June, July and August 1986 had been inadvertently taken to the incinerator. Charts for October were seized.
Barbara Stubbs, prosecuting for the West Midlands licensing authority, said the company's vehicles were found to have switches fitted into their tachograph circuits, allowing the tachograph recording devices be switched off while the tachograph clocks continued to work, indicating that the vehicles were at rest.
Supervising traffic examiner Donald Fisher said that Tanker Road Services operated their own tachograph calibration station. When the vehicles were examined the seals of the electronic tachographs were either missing or broken, enabling the drivers to interfere with the rear of the tachograph heads.
Angela Andrews, defending the drivers, said they were not responsible for breaking the seals and interfering with the tachographs: the company had been responsible for doing that, and it had placed drivers in a difficult situation.
William Deny of Willenhall admitted two offences of falsification and one of taking insufficient daily rest; he was fined £275 with 2150 costs. Graham Sinnott of Dudley (two offences of falsifying charts) was fined £200 with £150 costs, and Donald Ball of Wolverhampton (eight offences of falsifying charts) was fined £800 with £200 costs.
The company was fined £400 on each of 22 offences of failing to produce records, £1,000 on each of 22 offences of failing to preserve records and of seven offences of using vehicles with unsealed tachographs. It was ordered to pay £750 prosecution costs.