Garry Pettigrew has been banned from acting as a company director until 2035 after the Court of Session found that almost £3 million in assets were moved out of Healthcare Environmental Services Limited as the business was losing major NHS work. According to the Insolvency Service, the transfers placed assets beyond the reach of creditors at the point the company was sliding towards failure. This is more than a legal footnote. It is a clear example of what can happen when a company built around large public contracts suffers a sudden revenue shock and the remaining asset base is moved before lenders, suppliers and other creditors can recover what they are owed.

The timing is central to the case. The Insolvency Service said Pettigrew began moving equipment out of Healthcare Environmental Services Limited just days before the company lost 17 NHS England contracts in early October 2018. Further NHS contracts were terminated in December 2018, tightening the pressure on a business whose trading position was already badly weakened. Those contract losses followed a September 2018 meeting with NHS and government officials to discuss allegations of waste being stockpiled in breach of Environment Agency permits, according to the Insolvency Service. For any SME owner, the lesson is plain enough: when too much revenue depends on a small number of large contracts, one setback can turn into a solvency crisis very quickly.

Between October and December 2018, Pettigrew caused assets worth £2,979,383 to be transferred to HEG Sustainable Solutions Limited and Starryshaw Consultants Ltd, the Insolvency Service said. At the time, he and his wife were the only directors of those connected companies. The problem was not only the value involved but the way the transfers were handled. The company’s bank held security over all of Healthcare Environmental Services Limited’s assets, yet the transfers were made without the bank’s consent, despite advice from the company’s accountants and solicitors that consent was required. That is the point where poor trading stops looking like misfortune and starts looking like a serious governance failure.

Any prospect of a rescue then fell away. An attempt to sell the company collapsed in December 2018, trading ceased and all staff were made redundant. By the time Healthcare Environmental Services Limited entered liquidation in April 2019, it had debts of more than £15 million. That number matters because insolvency is never only a balance-sheet event. Behind the £15 million sat creditors waiting to be paid and workers who lost their jobs as the company shut down. In that setting, removing assets from the business carried direct consequences for the people left behind when the trading stopped.

In his judgment, Lord Lake said Pettigrew had been in 'flagrant' breach of his duties as a director and treated the conduct as being at the top end of the middle bracket for disqualification. The court imposed a nine-year ban, which means Pettigrew cannot be involved in the promotion, formation or management of a company without the court’s permission. The ruling was made on Thursday 20 August. Pettigrew, 59, of Shotts in North Lanarkshire, was also separately fined £1,000 plus costs in June 2025 after being found in contempt of court for taking photographs of witnesses in breach of a court prohibition and then republishing related material on social media.

The HES case did not end with one director. On 6 August 2021, the Insolvency Service accepted a 3.5-year director disqualification undertaking from Alison Pettigrew, who had been a co-director and was found to have allowed the transfers to take place. There was also a separate criminal case in Scotland over allegations of illegal medical waste storage, but those proceedings were dropped in October 2023. That distinction matters. The director disqualification case turned on the handling of company assets and the duties owed to creditors, not on the outcome of the criminal proceedings.

The Insolvency Service said the purpose of the disqualification is to protect the public and creditors, and this case fits that description. It also sends a wider signal to directors running businesses under financial strain: once insolvency is in view, related-party transfers will receive close attention, especially where lenders hold security and advisers have already warned against the move. For investors, suppliers and procurement teams, there is another takeaway. Heavy dependence on a handful of public contracts can leave a company badly exposed if those contracts are withdrawn. When that pressure is combined with weak governance, the damage can spread well beyond the boardroom.