GRIMSBY: Twice-bankrupt businessman Christopher Henshaw, 45, of Thoresby Road, Tetney, has been jailed for 16 weeks after admitting two offences of obtaining credit by not disclosing he was an undischarged bankrupt with liabilities of about £380,000.
Mr Henshaw was sentenced for illegally obtaining credit of £8437 from Lloyds TSB and £7149 from MKM Building Supplies between December 2007 and February 2009.
Prosecutor Stephen Brown told Grimsby Crown Court that Mr Henshaw had seven convictions for a total of 20 similar offences between 1983 and 2010. The court heard he had first been made bankrupt in 1999, leaving liabilities of about £280,000, and had signed a declaration that he could never obtain credit.
But in 2002 he set up two businesses with credit under the alias of Christopher Alexander. Mr Brown said Mr Henshaw was advised by a business consultant in 2006 that he could not obtain credit, but he went ahead, failing to disclose his past, only to be declared bankrupt for a second time in August 2009 with liabilities of about £100,000.
The court heard Mr Henshaw was described as "an asset" by his current employers, who also said he was a hard-working man and "able and skilled".
Mitigating, Hannah Walker said: "He accepts he was wrong and the seriousness of the offence."
Sentencing Mr Henshaw to 16 weeks in prison, Judge David Tremberg said Mr Henshaw had acted in "a cavalier and criminal manner with reckless disregard for the restrictions" placed upon him by the bankruptcy order.
"The business world functions on the basis of trust and you have proven repeatedly that you are not to be trusted," the judge said.
