Former Baldwins Travel owners disqualified as company directors

Two of the three former owners of Baldwins Travel have been banned from acting as company directors for a combined total of 23 years.

The Insolvency Service barred Scott Dylan and David Antrobus from being directors in December following a High Court ruling that they channelled £13.9 million in unauthorised overdrafts through companies which they subsequently wound up.

The money has yet to be recovered.

Dylan was banned for 13 years and Antrobus for 10. Insolvency Service chief investigator Victoria Edgar noted the pair operated “little short of a scam” and left insolvencies “worth more than £52 million”.

The disqualification notice made no mention of Baldwins Travel and its failure, the cost of which will be in addition to that £52 million, but the company was intricately bound up with Dylan, Antrobus and former Baldwins director Jack Mason’s affairs after they acquired the travel agency in September 2021.

Dylan was a director of Fresh Thinking Group which, through associated company Inc Travel Group, acquired Baldwins. At the time, Dylan was subject to a 2019 court undertaking not to act as a director while facing disqualification proceedings in relation to a separate company, SDRW Ltd.

The SDRW proceedings ended last September with The Insolvency Service imposing a separate eight-year ban on Dylan for acting as a director while bankrupt in breach of a 2005 court order – suggesting he has been operating while disqualified for two decades.

Despite these serial disqualifications, Dylan now claims to run NexaTech Ventures which he describes as “a £100 million venture capital” business with offices in London, Dublin and California.

Baldwins Travel was wound up in July last year by director Nick Marks, a member of the family which owned the business for 30 years up to September 2021 when Mason, Dylan and Antrobus bought it and Mason became a Baldwins director.

Two months after the takeover, Barclays Bank issued court proceedings against Mason, Dylan, Antrobus and others in pursuit of almost £14 million in “unauthorised borrowings”, claiming £2.8 million of this was used to acquire Baldwins.

Barclays obtained freezing orders on the trio’s assets, including Baldwins, which Mason, Dylan and Antrobus were subsequently found to have breached by transferring these first to a company in the British Virgin Islands and then to the US state of Delaware.

The three were sentenced to jail for contempt of court by moving the assets abroad in July 2024 and each sentenced to 22 months in prison. Dylan went to jail – and was released last October – while Mason and Antrobus fled abroad, with warrants for their arrest outstanding.

Bankruptcy proceedings initiated by Barclays against Mason, Dylan and Antrobus in pursuit of the missing money also remain outstanding.

It is a criminal offence to take part in “the promotion, formation or management of a company” while disqualified, including an overseas company which carries on business in the UK.