Advice on car purchase

rtanswell

Agreed. And running my own Ltd company I understand the benefit of tax efficiency etc and using the loopholes. However, this guy has knowingly sold faulty cars, with documented evidence to back this up which contravenes the Sale of Good Act 1976. But this is an offence which is not technically penalisable by a court of law seemingly.

In addition, he's then ignored any correspondence and denied trying to resolve the issue. He know the system, knows how to play it and knows that any of his victims have a fight on their hands to get what's due to them. To me this is dishonesty at it's very worst and fraudulent. There needs to be a punishment put in place to deter this from happening in the first place. Absolute scumbag!

somethingcorporate

Yes. Unfortunately the penalties are harsh but few people ever seem to be caught for them. I used to audit small companies and do brief reports into the history of the directors. The number that ran dozens of failed (i.e. wound up by HMRC) companies was actually frightening. There were people that had 50+ companies that had been involuntarily dissolved. The fact that they can do it again and again is a little bit concerning!

bris

The problem is these crooks use ltd companies for all their dodgy dealings. The cars belong to the company, not the directors so all the money is filtered away before the chargebacks take place. The only people who lose are the customers and the banks. The directors play the game so well they make a fortune from it.
It's not just cars, all trades do it, builders, double glazing, you name it. It's so easy to set up a company and then close it down when those 10 year guarantees start to become a problem for them.

rtanswell

This guy was a sole trader. In my opinion this is even worse than being a Ltd company. At least with a Ltd company you can track down the directors and get addresses for them and search to see if they have bad history in terms of company directorship.

This guy didn't even give me a proper name. However, being a bit IT savvy, I have details for him from looking up his domain name registration details. Of course, these again may be fake.

However, Ltd Company or Sole Tradership, if you have a turnover of more than £73k over a 12 month period, you need to be registered for VAT and details must be shown on any sales invoice you produce.

So if HMRC/VAT have been in and investigated and are happy, then this guy is hiding stuff! You can't have a forecourt of cars to the value of nearly £300k and be turning over less than £73k a year. Unless of course you are putting the sales through under different trading names.

It's totally fraudulent. How banks/Visa/Mastercard allow people like this to take credit card payments etc is beyond me! How they're allowed to carry on trading when they have so blatantly broken the Sale of Goods Act is also beyond me!

Now bear in mind we have evidence that this guy took the car sold to us to a Nissan dealership (under another company name, apparently a previously reputable one which used to trade from the same premises) 2 weeks before and we have that report disclosing a head gasket problem, then sold it to us in "perfect working order" and as "a really safe, reliable car for me and my family and young children", removed the engine management light in order to sell the car, gave a 3 month warranty with a 3rd party warranty company to cover the car and refused to offer any kind of recompense, he blatantly knew what he was doing. He was clearly breaking the Sale of Goods Act with no conscience at all and potentially putting mine and my family's lives in danger (the car's engine management kicked in doing 70mph dropping the power suddenly on a busy dual carriageway to 30mph) and has done the same to several customers we now know of, and is getting away with it. It's a shocking indightment of this country's laws.

somethingcorporate

I am not sure it's a failing of the law, merely the enforcement of it.

Evidently he has no regard for anything except the $$ he can wangle out of unsuspecting customers.

rtanswell

somethingcorporate wrote: »

I am not sure it's a failing of the law, merely the enforcement of it.

Evidently he has no regard for anything except the $$ he can wangle out of unsuspecting customers.

Yup! Well if the law doesn't catch up with him one day, then I sure hope that someone else does!