Business lecturer in fraud case

Nerys Fuller-Love failed to keep proper accounts, the jury heard

A university small business lecturer helped her husband run a firm fraudulently, a jury has heard.

Nerys Fuller-Love, 48, who lectures at the university in Aberystwyth, was in business with her husband, Donald Fuller-Love,

He denies four charges of fraudulently trading. She denies aiding and abetting him to run a firm fraudulently.

Mr Fuller-Love, 56, of Llangwyryfon, Aberystwyth, also denies theft of £135,781 from the European Union.

The couple set up the boat building firm in Borth, mid Wales in 1993. Mrs Fuller-Love was company secretary and her husband was a director of Steel Kit Ltd.

'Several incarnations'

The jury was told how the day before Steel Kit Ltd went under Mr Fuller-Love, 56, set up Steel Kit (UK) Ltd and obtained the assets of the old company but not the debts.

Steel Kit Ltd started to fail in March 1996, the hearing was told, and eventually disappeared only to re-appear under a slightly different name before it went under again. The business had several incarnations, the court heard.

Despite publishing a book on accounting in Welsh, Mrs Fuller-Love, a lecturer at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, failed to keep proper accounts or help the liquidator to sort out the financial mess left behind, said prosecutor James Rae, representing the Department of Trade and Industry.

The creditors are abandoned, whistling in hope or despair, for money that will never come. Prosecutor James Rae

He added that the couple's behaviour amounted to fraud.

It was obvious, he told jurors, that the firms could not pay their debts. At one stage Mr Fuller-Love was persuading customers to make out cheques to his suppliers rather than to one of his firms.

"Why? Because you don't want the money in the bank - the bank might not let it out again," said the prosecutor.

The Fuller-Loves, he added, had failed to maintain proper records.

"Proper accounts are something that the dishonest director can't afford. They were never made available to those who needed to have them," he said.

"That is a key feature in this case.

"The creditors are abandoned, whistling in hope or despair, for money that will never come."

Steel Kit Ltd was involved in designing the first purpose-built passenger boat to cruise Cardiff Bay since the barrage was built.

In her University of Wales, Aberystwyth profile, Ms Fuller-Love says she is a regular contributor to radio, television and newspaper reports on small businesses and entrepreneurship.

The case continues.