The disgraced former owner of Norton Motorcycles should have served jail time for his role in the multi-million-pound pension fraud, the chair of the Pensions Ombudsman service has told a parliamentary inquiry into the scandal.
The comments by Anthony Arter will be viewed by victims as a thinly veiled criticism of a prosecution run by the Pensions Regulator against former Norton boss, Stuart Garner, who was convicted of three pensions offences in 2022 but avoided prison because the regulator did not allege dishonesty.
Arter told MPs on the work and pensions committee on Wednesday: “I would have personally, of course, like to have seen him [Garner] prosecuted and imprisoned for the offences. Those people have suffered so much.”
He added that the Norton case was “the catalyst” for him setting up the Ombudsman’s “dishonesty unit”.
After pleading guilty to illegally investing millions of pounds of people’s retirement savings into his own businesses in 2022, Garner received an eight-month prison sentence, suspended for two years.
Sentencing, Judge Nirmal Shant QC said: “Had this offence been put on the basis of dishonesty, or one where it was said that you had gained personally significant amounts of money, the court would have no choice but to send you to immediate custody.”
The prosecution followed years of reporting on the scandal by the Guardian and ITV News, which exposed how senior government ministers feted Garner, who used Norton’s famous motorsport brand to live the lifestyle of a successful entrepreneur for a decade. He secured himself a cameo role in the 2015 Bond film Spectre and travelled with a government trade mission to China on Theresa May’s jet when she was prime minister.
The businessman, who had previously been a gamekeeper and run a fireworks company, acquired the Norton brand in 2008 with £1m borrowed directly from a pension fraud.
He then raised a further £10m to expand the company via a pension liberation scam – whereby more than 200 people were tricked in 2012 and 2013 by a salesman into transferring their existing retirement plans into new schemes where Garner was the trustee – before illegally investing those pension savings into Norton, his own business.
All that money subsequently disappeared, while Norton and Garner entered bankruptcy proceedings. The pension scheme members were forced to seek partial redress from the Fraud Compensation Scheme, a statutory public corporation accountable to parliament that can pay out only to victims of dishonesty.
Arter, who became the Pensions Ombudsman service’s interim chairman in January, was the Pensions Ombudsman in 2020 when he published an in-depth report on the Norton pensions scandal.
In it, he repeatedly described Garner as “dishonest” and ordered the entrepreneur to make a “restorative payment” to all the scheme members – then thought to total about £14m including interest.
Committee member Sir Desmond Swayne said: “What is so galling to members of the scheme is that their perception of the dishonesty – and indeed it was detected by the Ombudsman – was obvious. It is a matter of incredulity that it wasn’t pursued.”
Maria Evgenidou-Wright, head of enforcement proceedings at the Pensions Regulator, responded: “My team and I can see first hand the devastation that scams cause to people’s lives … But ultimately, in the prosecuting decisions we make, we have to be led by the evidence. Also … as the Pensions Ombudsman mentioned, the standard of proof is different: they would have to show ‘on the balance of probability’ that there was dishonesty; we would have to prove it to the criminal standard, beyond reasonable doubt.”
The regulator also told the committee that it had possessed information to prosecute Garner almost a decade before it eventually did so.
Garner did not respond to efforts to contact him. He has always claimed he was a victim after unwittingly becoming involved with a series of fraudsters.
Norton was bought out of administration in April 2020 and has since begun marketing bikes as a separate business under new ownership.
