PCS UPDATE... THOSE IN THE KNOW KEPT ASKING: WHY WAS PCS ALLOWED TO OPERATE ILLEGALLY FOR SO LONG?
Following the imprisonment of John Murphy and four other senior members of the management of Professional Chauffeur Services, and the fine imposed on the company of £250,000 for car clocking, Emirates Airlines has finally severed its commercial relation- ship with PCS Events Ltd and its spin-off company Sapphire Travel Man- agement.
According to an email leaked to
TheChauffeur.com, Emirates has appointed TriStar Worldwide Chauffeur Services to take over the multi-million pound contract from this month to carry its first class and business class passengers from Manchester and Birm- ingham Airports.
Emirates has been accused of putting its passengers at risk by having continued to use PCS companies over the past ten years, ignoring repeated warnings about licensing irregularities and consecutive bankruptcies. The airline continued to use PCS even after its boss John Murphy was sent to prison in February 2017 for orchestrating one of Britain’s biggest car clocking frauds, which wiped an esti- mated 50 million miles from cars used to transport Emirates passengers to and from airports in northern England.
John Murphy, 66, went from second hand car trader – convicted in the 1980’s twice for offences related to car clock- ing and once for tax evasion – to the boss of one of the UK’s biggest chauf- feur firms.
Over the last sixteen years, Murphy has not only persuaded global brands such as Emirates Airlines to hand him multi- million pound contracts, but he also managed to keep the authorities at arms-length, allegedly thanks in part to the Emirates connection.
Murphy was able to run such an unprece- dented fraud for years after police refused to investigate him, according to The Times. Despite being based in
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Cheshire, PCS went more than 200 miles to Berwick council to obtain an opera- tor’s licence. It also used a licensing official at the council to establish a struc- ture that the company said exempted its drivers and cars from normal licensing rules, using Scottish law. Drivers were given official-looking cards and told to show them to police if stopped.
Officials and lawyers at several councils who investigated PCS considered the structure to be a scam and licensing experts say it allowed Murphy to avoid the scrutiny of regular MoT tests that might have uncovered clocking sooner.
Northumberland Council, the Unitary Authority which had merged with Berwick and received repeated warnings about Murphy’s conduct, moved to rescind PCS’s operator’s licence in 2014 but only after a complaint from a local landlord that his property, which was supposedly being used as the compa- ny’s dispatch centre, had been empty for years.
However Murphy withdrew his own licence before he could have it revoked, having secured another licence from Transport for London (TfL) - despite having no working dispatch centre in the capital.
PCS and its chauffeurs were allowed to operate with TfL licences for more than two years even though one of the authority’s own investigators discovered that Murphy had persuaded a topo- graphical test centre in the capital, where drivers are assessed on their knowledge of London’s roads, to pro- vide the answers in advance. The test centre has since closed.
Despite applying for licences across the country, Murphy was in fact operating from Runcorn, which is controlled by Halton Borough Council. The council repeatedly failed to act over allegations of licensing irregularities despite receiv- ing repeated warnings and complaints about the company from business rivals, members of the public and even the local MP.
The Times newspaper obtained evi- dence that one of the council’s licensing officials received allegations that Mur- phy was clocking cars seven years ago but no action was taken for a further four years.
The same official was sent documents showing that vehicles were not insured or were using the wrong insurance but again no action was taken against the company. When the official left Halton council in 2015 he went into a job at PCS and has worked for the Murphy family since.
The failure by licensing officials to act against PCS extended to the police. Greater Manchester Police also allowed Murphy to run an illegal multimillion- pound business for years, according to The Times. Greater Manchester Police was allegedly reluctant to embarrass the firm’s corporate business partners.
In July 2013, trading standards returned to PCS’s Runcorn premises, supported by Cheshire Police, following a visit in 2011. Following a two-and-a-half year investigation by Warrington and Halton trading standards, believed to have been their biggest car clocking investigation, John Murphy was successfully prosecut- ed along with PCS Events Limited for removing at least seven and a half mil- lion miles from his fleet of more than a hundred Mercedes.
According to The Times he failed to properly maintain, license or insure vehi- cles, leaving not only high-profile clients such as David Beckham, Wayne Rooney
APRIL 2018
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