Hot tub fraudster who made £800,000 ordered to pay back just £10

Hundreds of customers across the country were cheated by Staffordshire-based Spaserve with faulty goods or hot tubs that never arrived.

A jury at Stafford crown court found three of its bosses guilty of fraudulent trading and last month they were given jail sentences totalling eight years.

Principal partner Simon Foster, formerly from Stafford, now living in Lichfield, appeared back before the court for an uncontested Proceeds of Crime hearing.

Mr Nick Burn, prosecuting, said it had been agreed that Foster's personal benefit from the crime was £800,000.

However it was decided that Foster should pay back £10 immediately with the court hearing that he had already been declared bankrupt and the official receiver has first claim on his assets.

Foster spearheaded the fraud on customers while living a 'millionaire's lifestyle', the court had previously been told.

The jury heard he had three Porsches on the drive of his luxury home at The Green in Milford, near Stafford, took expensive holidays, sent his children to private school and had a box at Birmingham City football club.

For three years Spaserve was used as a 'cash cow' to rake in advance payments from customers who were sold faulty hot tubs or the ordered products never arrived.

The court heard the firm, based in Towers Business Park, Rugeley, took between £6 million and £8million worth of orders for 2,000 hot tubs over three-and-a-half years from April 2007 to October 2010.

But only in the region of 1,600 were ever delivered.

And of those delivered customers were left angry at the substandard spas and by the fact they had been duped of the country of manufacture.

Foster took at least £900,000 from the business while sales manager and co-owner Stuart Cox, 40, of Oak Way, Sutton Coldfield, took in the region of £200,000 plus £100,000 in expenses.

A third employee, general manager, Jonathan Husselbee, 37, of High Street, Dotshill, near Tamworth was paid a £35,000 annual salary plus benefits.

After a three-month trial the trio were found guilty of fraudulent trading and conspiracy to defraud. They had pleaded not guilty.

The jury heard that Spaserve was not the first company Foster was involved with to go bankrupt. He and his wife Katie were joint owners of a firm called Acara, which supplied hot tubs.

In 2007 Acara went in to liquidation with debts of £500,000 and assets of just £200. At the time, the Insolvency Service was considering disqualifying Foster from being a company director, but in the end decided not to.

The fraud was brought down by an action group of dissatisfied customers and subsequent investigations by trading standards and Staffordshire Police.

Foster, aged 49, formerly of The Green, Milford was jailed for three and a half years; Cox, got 30 months and Husselbee, two years.

Recorder Ms Abigail Nixon ruled Foster had benefited by £800,000 and gave him seven days to pay £10 or face a further week in jail.