Am I being REALLY thick?

[EverClean]

I was watching Goodfellas the other day - the scene where Paul takes a stake in a restaurant and buys goods on the restaurant's credit and sells them out of the back door at half the cost and basically runs the restaurant into the ground.

What's to stop this from happening?

Say I open up a business, buy goods through the business, sell them and somehow these items fail to appear in the books then wind up the company.

Where do the debts go? If it's a limited company then where is my liability?

[Loosehead]

Well the business either buys the goods on credit or has to pay on delivery or some other payment arrangement. If the goods are not paid for then the business owes the suppliers. If the business stops paying the supliers will stop supplying and the busness will be in debt. Steps will then be taken by the supplyers to recover what they can from the business, not to mention the IR etc. The debt belongs to the business regardless of the trading entity. If it's a limited company they cannot persue the directors personally unless something dis honest has taken place but they can freeze the companies assetts etc. This is often done by the official receiver, who in some cases may take over the business and run it as a going concern until it has been sold. In the mean time an examination of the books will demonstrate that fraud and theft have been taking place, Ie goods sold but money not deposited in the business. This will give the powers that be all they need to nail the directors to the financial wall as it where.

Bottom line: there are very few new ideas in scammery!