The owner of a Suffolk hand car wash has been banned from being a company director for seven years after Immigration Enforcement officers found he had employed four people with no right to work in the UK.
Vittorio Dragoti’s Fiveways Car Wash in Barton Mills was visited last year by the Home Office officials, who found Romanian nationals between the ages of 19 and 49 should not have been working here.
As a result of this, Dragoti, 28, of Mildenhall, Suffolk, was banned by the government’s Insolvency Service from being a company director until May 2032.
While the car wash was investigated last year, this February the Home Office announced it would be ramping up enforcement action on firms employing people who have no right to work.
Dave Magrath, the Insolvency Service’s director of investigation and enforcement, says that “company directors have clear statutory obligations to recruit people who have the right to work in the UK”.
He adds that “consumers deserve to have confidence that workers providing services to them are not working illegally”, and that “workers themselves deserve to not be put in such a vulnerable position by people who may exploit their immigration status”.
Magrath says that Dragoti’s disqualification was the result of “ongoing close collaboration between the Insolvency Service and our partners at the Home Office to clamp down on rogue directors”.
