1:30 pm, November 18, 2024
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has banned a car dealer from working in financial services following a grievous bodily harm conviction.
In July 2020, car dealer Ari Harris was convicted of inflicting grievous bodily harm without intent after stabbing a man twice.
He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years imprisonment in July 2022.
The confrontation occurred on May 8, 2018, in a public car park whereupon Harris stabbed a man twice in the neck with a kitchen knife, leaving the man with life-changing injuries.
Handing down the sentence at Isleworth Crown Court on July 22, 2022, the judge said: ‘Rather than remaining on the scene to see whether [the victim] was alive or dead, because stab wounds to the neck can be fatal, as you well know, you left the scene, on the face of it, appearing not to show any care or responsibility to a victim whom you had harmed.’
The FCA said Harris and Reeds Motors Ltd, of which he was sole director, ‘deliberately failed to notify the FCA of his offending, conviction and custodial sentence, despite obligations to do so. They deliberately provided false and misleading information to cover up the fact that he was in prison’.
The business submitted an application for an additional person to be financially approved, whereupon the regulator began investigations.
‘Both Mr Harris and the firm stated that this was required as Mr Harris was currently overseas and looking into a business abroad,’ said the FCA.
‘Mr Harris continued to mislead the FCA during a telephone call, failing to mention that he was actually in prison at the time.’
The authority has now removed Harris’s approval to perform the senior management function at Reeds Motors, and has banned him from working in financial services in the future.
The FCA has also cancelled the firm’s permissions.
Therese Chambers, executive director of enforcement and market oversight said: ‘These repeated efforts to conceal Mr Harris’s violent criminal conviction and incarceration clearly show a shocking lack of honesty and integrity.
‘This ban is fully warranted.’
