A Derby builder who took more than £200,000 from customers while knowingly trading through an insolvent company has had his prison sentence suspended by the Court of Appeal.
Michael Haslam, of Oaklands Avenue, Littleover, was originally sentenced to two years and four months in prison at Derby Crown Court on July 1.
However, the Court of Appeal suspended the sentence at a hearing on Wednesday, August 26.
The 74-year-old’s sentence will now be suspended for two years. He was also given a rehabilitation order and must complete 160 hours of unpaid work.
Haslam had pleaded guilty in May to one count of fraudulent trading following an investigation by the Insolvency Service.
He was also disqualified from acting as a company director for 15 years, the maximum available period.
Haslam operated M&J Builders Limited and accepted payments for home improvement projects between November 2020 and 2022 despite knowing that the company was insolvent.
Seven customers suffered combined losses of around £210,000. Some were left with unfinished or unsafe homes and had to borrow money or pay other builders to rectify the work.
One woman from Darley Abbey paid the company more than £150,000 during the first half of 2021 for work on a property she planned to renovate for her retirement.
The Insolvency Service said she received around £40,000 worth of work before the project stopped in July 2021. She then spent a further £18,000 clearing the site before appointing another builder.
In a victim impact statement, she said: “I have lost confidence in myself and trust in others. And I have lost the retirement I had planned and worked so hard for.”
Another customer paid £47,760 for an extension and garage refurbishment at her home in Allestree.
Work stopped in June 2022, leaving the property unsafe and without running water for seven months. She later paid Haslam another £6,600 after he demanded further money to restart the project, but no more work was completed.
The customer said faults included steelwork that was incapable of bearing the load of the house and raw sewage flowing onto the patio.
A second Allestree customer paid £12,080 in advance for a kitchen renovation. The work began in May 2022 but was left unfinished in July, while windows and doors that had been paid for had not been ordered.
A replacement builder found that some of the work failed to meet safety standards. The customer borrowed against her mortgage to cover the cost of putting it right.
Two other victims lived in Mickleover.
One agreed to pay £18,300 for work on her family home. The project began in March 2022 but was affected by delays before stopping in August.
The family later discovered that a window they had paid for had not been ordered. Council inspectors warned that the extension might need to be demolished, but the family had already taken out a loan and could not afford to begin again.
Another customer, a mental health nurse, agreed a price of £32,100 for a single-storey extension days after Haslam had received professional advice that his company was insolvent.
She eventually paid £35,880 after being told weekly payments would speed up the work. Doors and windows invoiced in May were not installed, and the family was left without a safe fire exit or secure door.
She said in her victim statement: “Your actions did not just damage our home. They took away our sense of safety, our trust in others, and our financial stability.”
The Insolvency Service said its investigation identified almost £400,000 paid from the M&J Builders business account under the reference “MG Haslam Expenses”.
A £75,000 loan received by the company in October 2020 was spent within weeks, while investigators identified a further £63,055 in cash withdrawals.
A personal account into which some customers were instructed to pay showed cash withdrawals totalling £164,229, almost £19,000 spent through Amazon and eBay and £77,376 paid to Haslam’s daughter.
Mark Stephens, chief investigator at the Insolvency Service, said after the original sentencing that the case demonstrated the impact fraud could have on victims.
He added: “Every single one of his victims would not have gone anywhere near him had they known the true state of his company’s finances.”
