The Judge’s remarks from earlier in the thread:
- As you come to be sentenced you tell me through counsel that you feel humiliated and your prison cell is small.
- You fight everything and everybody who is against you with your wealth. You are highly litigious.
- Lee Qualter, you agreed to Pilley’s sham arrangements. You were, you said, a puppet and a stooge.
- Pilley had a client list he referred to as 'the bent selling list'
- Chapman sent Pilley an email saying “You reject my advice because you are crooked. I need to get out or I will be tainted more than I am already”
- Michelle felt disrespected by her brother Pilley
Here is what Judge Knowles said to each defendant as he sentenced them:
Andrew Pilley - Asked whether he needed to sit in the dock
Andrew James Pilley, the removal to prison of your loyal employee, your sometime best friend and your own sister is your doing as well as theirs.
In 1998 you went to prison for four months for conspiracy to steal from the post office where you were a counter clerk.
Yours could have been a remarkable story of redemption, success, local heroism and philanthropy. Instead it is a sordid tale of squalid lies, greed and fraud.
You told brazen lies to the jury. When confronted with your own words typed with your own hands you complained ludicrously of trial by email.
Missing from your evidence was any conventional sense of honesty. You endlessly repeated, “I detest mis-sell,” but the reason you gave was never that customers should not be cheated, nor that salespeople should be truthful. It was only ever that it was a danger to your business.
On your first visit to this court, your counsel’s first words were to ask that you should not have to sit in the dock. I refused it on the basis that all defendants are treated equally here. Now as you come to be sentenced you tell me through counsel that you feel humiliated and your prison cell is small.
Here in court you are not special. You are a criminal. You are a fraudster.
You share many traits, many of them unattractive, with other successful fraudsters.
You are a hypocrite who will not tolerate criticism. When the BBC told the truth about you and your crooked businesses you launched a formal complaint.
You fight everything and everybody who is against you with your wealth. You are highly litigious. There are many examples. I shall give only two. You threatened to sue the Mayburys.
You sued the local authority which prosecutes this case in the High Court, alleging misfeasance in public office, unlawful obtaining of search warrants, particularly by an allegedly unfair presentation of the application, trespass and conversion: BES Commercial Electricity Ltd and others v Cheshire West and Chester Council [2022] EWHC 2162 (QB).
You were entitled to contest the case and to do so in those ways and before the jury and entitled to bring the civil proceedings and none of that inflates your sentence. But it gives an insight into you and it fits with everything I observed of you before you gave evidence, during your evidence, and afterwards.
You called character witnesses. One said you “took round PlayStations as Christmas presents to children – nobody knew” and provided meals to needy families.
Your counsel elicited from your witness that unlike others, “he doesn’t tell anybody – I’ve never heard him brag or boast about anything that he’s given”.
I think that adducing that evidence caused you little mortification.
There is though no doubt that the money you have given has done great good in Fleetwood. Fleetwood has suffered a terrible decline through no fault of its people, and your investment, for instance at Poolfoot, has been transformational for people of all ages and backgrounds. But now everyone must reckon with the painful truth that much of your wealth came from crime.
I have no reason to think that your only motive for doing good in Fleetwood was to court admiration, but given the huge profits you have made from your crimes it is difficult to regard what you did there as significant mitigation.
I also bear in mind that whilst your businesses have given jobs to many, those which featured in this case are now tainted by crime, and the corrupt culture has tainted many of the young and impressionable sales people who were recruited.
You are said to be a good friend, a good son and a good father and grandfather and it is no doubt true. Your eldest son speaks of his distress that you will be absent when his second child is born and of much else in his measured letter. Your 18 year-old daughter similarly writes a letter which I have read several times. She gives an overview, with remarkable maturity, of the impact on your family of your going to jail. She says, “I am not trying to challenge or question anything, this is just a letter from the heart of a girl who misses her dad...Please consider this: we are a family with real feelings and real problems”.
As an eminent judge once said in a case on the topic,crime turns lives upside down. Your daughter says much the same later in her letter. I take your family into account, but it can only be to a very limited extent....
I accept that BES was not fraudulent from its beginnings but that is of little account because the sham companies were and BES’s trading throughout the whole indictment period was.
It is inevitable that some telesales staff on commission will lie. The employer’s remedy is to sack them when they are caught. There is no use in having an elaborate system for monitoring lying if, as in your businesses, there are no real adverse consequences.
You operated a reverse system. The best liars were promoted. When as in a couple of exceptional instances people were sacked the sacking was illusory because they just
moved to new jobs in your other areas of business.
You ran the businesses fraudulently, entirely deliberately. You adopted the lies that were told and tacitly encouraged them.
As the journalist from the BBC found, everybody knew the difference between the paperwork and the reality.
There were at least three purposes to your compliance department. The main one was
to make sure that the staff used your sales techniques – an improvement on simply having a floorwalker listening in. Another was to lend credence to your claims that BES was a clean business – window-dressing, in other words. A third was to enable you to calibrate the extent and nature of the fraud so that you as an entrepreneur could make the call of risk against reward on the best information.
The compliance department cost you money, but the question is whether there was a net gain and I am sure you considered that there was.
There was legitimate trading too. That again was part of the balance you struck.
You were the author of the fast track scheme.
You deliberately had your staff deceive customers, the Ombudsman and Ofgem and you yourself deceived Ofgem on a grand scale as to the whole nature of your relationship to the sham companies and as to the call recordings, all whilst posing as a champion of plain dealing and enemy of fraud. Even your top-up of the Ofgem fine is likely to have been