Club treasurer jailed for selling lethal chemicals Paint stripper and weed killer was banned

THE treasurer of a leading non-League football club has been jailed for selling deadly chemicals as paint stripper and weedkiller.

Weedkiller sold on Amazon and eBay by Nicholas Corbett, treasurer of Atherstone Town, contained a chemical that could cause kidney failure. The paint-stripper contained a carcinogenic product.

Warwick Crown Court heard how the 45-year-old, from Nuneaton, continued selling the items despite warnings from the Health and Safety Executive and Trading Standards.

Corbett, who pleaded guilty to three charges of breaching health and safety regulations relating to the sale of chemicals, was jailed for ten months.

Alexander Stein, prosecuting for the HSE, said Corbett was the sole director of a business called Abel UK Ltd, which began as a cleaning business.

But he then moved on to selling products online through Amazon and eBay.

The HSE became concerned about a product he was selling as Total Weedkiller and a paint strip- per, both of which failed the required regulations.

The weedkiller contained 20 per cent sodium chlorate, banned from sale to the public as a weedkiller both in the UK and in the EU.

Ingesting even low levels can lead to the destruction of red blood cells and kidney failure, and has caused death.

When Corbett was contacted about it in 2014, he claimed he was no longer selling Total Weedkiller. In fact, he continued selling the same product under a different name.

Abel UK’s sales data showed more than 8,000 individual sales, totalling £236,000, between March 2014 and September 2017.

During the same period, he also made more than 1,500 sales, totalling £46,000, of a paint stripper which contained high concentrations of dichloromethane, a carcinogenic chemical which can also cause the oxygen count in the blood to be decreased.

The maximum permitted concentration is 0.1 per cent but test purchases were found to contain between 63 per cent and 86 per cent, which Judge Anthony Potter pointed out was “in excess of 600 times the permitted amount”.

John Cooper QC, defending, said to meet Corbett had left school at 16 and worked in a bank while studying accountancy at night school. He then worked at Jaguar before beginning as a sole trader when he was 29 or 30.

He developed a vehicle-cleaning business and in 2012 started Abel UK, which has since been dissolved, and became exposed to the use of chemicals as cleaning products.

Corbett set up Abel Group Midlands Ltd in 2016, employing nine people who would lose their jobs if he was jailed.

Jailing Corbett, Judge Anthony Potter told him: “What makes your offending worse is that you had been warned in careful terms by Leicestershire Trading Standards in November 2014 of the dangers of selling such a product.

“You sent a response in 2014 to say you no longer sold Total Weedkiller. That was literally true, because you had re-named the product.

“You tried, in my view, to get round inconvenient regulations. All the time, you were continuing to sell the paint stripper and the weedkiller under various guises. It is a flagrant disregard of the law. The harm can be well established. It is death.”