The maverick freeholder Michael Stainer, 74, who owns The Grand hotel and apartments in Folkestone, has been sentenced to three years in prison.
He was found to have cheated staff and taxpayers out of nearly £500,000.
Mr Stainer’s wife Doris, 60, was charged with her chartered accountant husband but was cleared by the jury after insisting that she had no idea what her husband was up to.
One staff employee was presented with a tax bill of £3,500, and subsequently it emerged that Mr Stainer had withheld all the staff’s tax contributions.
In spite of some hasty lobbying by UK housebuilders as soon as Michael Gove was fired as communities secretary, his successor Greg Clark has emphatically said they are still going to have to pay up the £3bn building safety levy.
The announcement is made today in the ‘I’ newspaper (Twitter: @Theipaper), whose property writer Victoria Spratt reported housebuilder lobbying to reverse the charge.
Mr Clark says:
“Nor will there be backsliding on the £3 billion building safety levy.
