I think there is actions that need investigation Steve has said that some of the actions were "dishonest" and later he says "were not paid even though one of the trustee's had signed cheques etc, and these unpaid cheques had been found inside a filing cabinet" http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1978/31 Section 2 (1)b Theft Act 1978 comes to mind on that one statement alone. A trustee signs cheques intending that management pays bills and doesn't pay them making the creditor wait or forego payment seems like in need of a Police investigation. For the money to go elsewhere into organisations that are then controlled by those same people seems rather dishonest. Investigation will be as to "intent" and "dishonesty" The Police only need reasonable suspicion to start the investigation and of course an allegation that needs investigating which seems in hand.

Personally if I were steve I would be delaying the ET cases for as long as possible because the result of the Police investiagtion is most relevant to any outcome in the ET.

I will feed back when I have spoken to the Police on Monday, I hope we can delay the ET till at least we have prepared our defense, I am not sure as I have not been involved in ET's before what to expect , would the ET come down on the side of the employees or would they take in to consideration other factors such as dishonesty and mismagement of the Charity.

The ET won't be on anyone side. They apply the law to the facts.

The starting point in this instance is that the employees were fairly dismissed by reason of redundancy.

As such, they are all entitled (by statute) to notice and redundancy pay and payment for any accrued untaken holiday entitlement.

An ET will award them these payments in full unless they decide to make deductions in response to a strong evidenced counter-claim

The Police only need reasonable suspicion to start the investigation and of course an allegation that needs investigating which seems in hand.

I'm still not sure what the police would "investigate"? I may be missing something, but it seems that the charity has closed so there isn't any evidence they can gather other than what the Op gives them. I guess the only thing they could do is interview the employees concerned.

I will feed back when I have spoken to the Police on Monday, I hope we can delay the ET till at least we have prepared our defense, I am not sure as I have not been involved in ET's before what to expect , would the ET come down on the side of the employees or would they take in to consideration other factors such as dishonesty and mismagement of the Charity.

If its a redundancy situation, there is a statutory right to redundancy pay - the ET can't make deductions just because it feels like it. Ultimately you and the other trustees were responsible for managing the charity. You may have a counterclaim for civil fraud but its unlikely you could counterlclaim for mismanagement.

One way around it would be to argue that the employees were summarily dismissed due to gross misconduct rather than being made redundant, I'm not sure how well this fits the facts.

An investigation starts with information that has been supplied to the Police by the informant. All the paperwork that steve provides is the starting point. They should take that information and interview the suspects over it. There may be property / money that has been inproperly obtained that needs to be traced and recovered. There may be bank accounts to be investigated and traced. Paperwork that the suspect used property obtained and bought from ill gotten gains. An interview under caution to get the other side of the story maybe evidence to disprove and clear the suspect. "Investigate" means to go where the evidence takes you or not and to do so that is legal and whereby that evidence can be admitted in evidence in a court. It is not just what the informant hands to the Police... that starts the process.

Hi thought I would give an update, although the Police gave us a Crime number they would not investigate due to the loss not being a large amount of money. The Employment tribunal granted the 4 ex-employees Redundancy Pay, notice pay and unused holiday pay. We had further stress when the HMRC contacted us to claim £53,000 from unpaid tax and insurance that had not been paid for the past three years. We also received a demand from The Redundancy Payment Office for the payments that they made to the ex- staff. Thanks to our brilliant MP HMRC and Redundancy payment office wrote off the debts. I did think I could then move on and learn from the experience, which had cost me and the other Trustees approx £4500 each to settle contacts and leases that the ex- manger had entered in to without my knowledge or agreement. The Chair of the Charity has just this week received a recorded letter from the ex- manager demanding that the shortfall from payments that were made from The Redundancy Office which would be notice and holiday pay ( because technically we are not individually insolvent) and threats the high court enforcement officer to collect this, I am going to see a Solicitor on Friday as the ex- manager did not exercise any duty of care which resulted in me losing in excess of £4500 and she has the cheek to try and recover more from us even though she created the mess in the first place any advice would be much appreciated.

I know it's a year since your last post Steve, but can you tell us how this panned out ?