0,600 fine for ICL LT 'public'
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says Govt
EIGHTEEN Months of investigation and adjourned court appearances ended last week when International Coach Lines of Thornton Heath, Surrey, was fined E3,600 for 36 driving hours and records offences. The firm has now gone into voluntary liquidation.
In February, Croydon magistrates fined three ICL drivers for failing to take adequate daily rest and failing to hand in tachograph discs (CM, February 13), but a fourth driver, Anthony Radcliffe, while pleading guilty to two charges of failing to take adequate daily rest, pleaded not guilty to seven charges for failing to hand in tachograph discs. He believed that ICL may have mislaid them deliberately and to substantiate this he had issued a witness summons on ICL director Nigel Margo.
Representing the Department of Transport at a second hearing last week, Martin Bentley suggested to Nigel Margo that when Metropolitan traffic examiner George Davis had visited the ICL office not one tachograph disc could be produced. "That surprises me," replied Margo and he said he did not know what could have happened to them.
Radcliffe told the magistrates that he believed records may have been deliberately destroyed to cover up breaches of hours regulations. He admitted that on two or three occasions he wrote out fresh log sheets on the directive of Margo to falsify missing techograph discs "so that they would look more legal."
The magistrates said that they considered the offences "most serious" and a "flagrant abuse of the law". As well as encouraging drivers to break the law, they were placing passengers' lives in danger.
The seven charges for failing to hand in tachograph discs were found not proved and so dismissed but Radcliffe was found guilty of the two hours offences and fined £40 for each one.
ICL director Louis Margo (who was not in court, and sent a letter to say he was in the USA because of family illness), faced two charges for failing to keep proper records. Traffic examiner George Davis said that when he had visited the ICL office in January 1981 to inspect records, Louis Margo had produced two log sheets on which the mileage and start/finish points were omitted.
Louis Margo was found guilty on these two charges and fined £40 for each and ordered to pay £40 costs.
ICL driver Harry Hanger was fined £40 for one hours offence.