Helen Morten, deputy official receiver for the Insolvency Service, said: “Daljit Dhillon set out specifically to mislead members of the public who were in a vulnerable financial position for her own considerable personal gain.
“The court’s decision to disqualify her shows the seriousness with which this type of cynical financial service activity is viewed.”
The 42-year old, Daljit Kaur Dhillon from Sutton Coldfield, appeared at the High Court in Birmingham on 13 September where she was banned and ordered to pay costs of £12,000.
Known by a variety of names, including Kareena Kapoor, Lisa Dhillon and Daljit Kaur, Dhillon was the director of three companies: Repossession Management Bureau Ltd, RMB Assets Ltd and OM Payments Ltd.
The companies offered financial assistance to people with mortgage arrears but clients complained that they were unaware of the exorbitant fees they charged.
After an investigation by the Insolvency Service, the companies were wound-up in the High Court in September 2015.
Investigators found the companies were formed after a previous business, Red2Black Ltd, ceased trading after a government agency investigation.
This investigation led to the director of Red2Black, Gurpreet Singh Chadda – Dhillon’s former husband – being slapped with a Final Notice and record fine of nearly £1m.
The promise of equity protection
The companies all targeted people under threat of repossession offering to protect the equity, they would take out a charge on the properties.
However, the companies failed to properly disclose the fees it planned to charge or that the charge secured the indebtedness of the client.
When the property was sold, the companies exercised the charge to extract grossly excessive fees for which no record was maintained to support the amount of work that had purportedly been undertaken.
Meanwhile, representatives of the companies used false names, which prevented clients from determining who they were dealing with.
Investigators found that Repossession Management Bureau and RMB Assets held charges worth just under £4m over properties belonging to 97 clients.
Together, the two companies had a trade income of more than £1.2m, of which just over £1.1m was paid out to Daljit Dhillon.
The companies were also found to have charged VAT on invoices despite submitting nil VAT returns to the authorities.
Daljit Dhillon was declared bankrupt in June 2016 on the petition of the Official Receiver as liquidator of the three companies, after she failed to repay £353,550 worth of void transactions back to the companies.
The Official Receiver has also lodged debts of over £1.5m in Dhillon’s bankruptcy and has recouped a further £40,000 from a former sales agent.
