There is a simple business lesson in the Garry Pettigrew ruling: when a contractor is sliding into distress, the treatment of its assets matters just as much as the revenue it is losing. According to the Insolvency Service, the former director of Healthcare Environmental Services Limited has been banned from acting as a company director until 2035 after almost £3 million of assets were transferred to connected companies as NHS work fell away. That makes this more than a courtroom footnote. For suppliers, lenders and public bodies, it is a reminder that when a major service provider starts to wobble, the damage can spread quickly from operational disruption to creditor losses and job losses.

Healthcare Environmental Services was a waste disposal business serving the NHS. The pressure point came in early October 2018, when the company lost 17 NHS England contracts across a two-day period after Pettigrew had attended a meeting the previous month with NHS and government officials to discuss allegations of waste stockpiling in breach of Environment Agency permits. Further NHS contracts were terminated in December 2018. In plain terms, the company was not dealing with a small dip in trading. It was losing the contracts that underpinned the business, and losing them at speed.

The Insolvency Service says Pettigrew began moving equipment out of the company just days before the first contract losses. Between October and December 2018, assets worth £2,979,383 were transferred from Healthcare Environmental Services to HEG Sustainable Solutions Limited and Starryshaw Consultants Ltd, two connected companies where, at the time, Pettigrew and his wife were the only directors. That detail matters. Connected-party transfers are always likely to draw scrutiny when a company is in trouble, especially when creditors are already exposed and the value being moved is substantial.

The transfers were made without the consent of the companys bank, which held security over all of the firms assets, despite advice from the companys accountants and solicitors that consent was required. By the time Healthcare Environmental Services entered liquidation in April 2019, it owed more than £15 million. For creditors, that is the point where a difficult restructuring story turns into a value-recovery story. Once assets have been shifted beyond reach, the pool available to banks, trade suppliers and other claimants can shrink sharply.

In a Court of Session ruling on Thursday 20 August, Pettigrew was disqualified for nine years. The ban means he cannot be involved in the promotion, formation or management of a company unless a court gives permission. Lord Lake said Pettigrew had been in "flagrant" breach of his duties and placed the conduct at the top end of the middle bracket for disqualification cases. The court outcome is significant because director disqualification is not only punitive. It is also a market signal. It tells lenders, counterparties and procurement teams that the misconduct reached a level the court considered serious enough to justify a long exclusion from boardroom control.

There was a human cost alongside the balance-sheet damage. An attempt to sell the company collapsed in December 2018, trading ceased and all staff were made redundant. That sequence will be familiar to many creditors in insolvency cases: contracts go, rescue talks fail, trading stops, and the remaining arguments centre on what value is left and who can still recover anything. The Insolvency Service investigation began shortly after the liquidation. In August 2021, Pettigrews co-director, Alison Pettigrew, accepted a three-and-a-half-year director disqualification undertaking for allowing the transfers to take place. Governance failures rarely sit with one individual alone; they often reflect what a board permits when pressure builds.

There are also wider legal threads to the case. Pettigrew was fined £1,000 and ordered to pay 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 material with offensive comments on social media. Separate criminal proceedings brought in Scotland over allegations of illegal medical waste storage were dropped in October 2023. For Market Pulse UK readers, the broader takeaway is straightforward. Public-sector contractors can look stable until a concentration of contract risk is exposed. Once that happens, weak governance can deepen losses for creditors, leave employees carrying the fallout and raise hard questions for procurement teams about oversight, resilience and contingency planning.