ON Monday January 15, 2018, the construction and outsourcing conglomerate Carillion went bust. So the third anniversary has just arrived.

Steve Paul remembers clearly how he found out about the Carillion collapse. At the time he was running his plastering and flooring business in the West Midlands. His company, SDP Floorscreeds Ltd, had big contracts with Carillion for building floors on the £300m Midland Metropolitan Hospital project in Birmingham.

Paul got a call from one of his supervisors on the Metropolitan project at eight in the morning. “He told me the gates were locked and the men couldn’t get on site. Everything was padlocked. There were security guards. All our materials and plant for the floors were locked inside the gates.”

He didn’t know it then, but that phone call foreshadowed financial ruin. His financial ruin.

Carillion was the second part of a double whammy to hit his business. In the middle of 2017, he’d also been left out by another major construction contractor who didn’t settle an outstanding bill of around £400,000. They put 10 per cent down and then some, but nowhere near the total.

One of the company directors told Paul they had big London lawyers and they would see him in court if he could afford it. That meant there wasn’t enough money in Floorscreeds Ltd’s bank accounts to save the business when Carillion crashed, costing him hundreds and hundreds of thousands. Carillion’s downfall bankrupted him.

In better days, Paul employed hundreds and had a turnover of well over £10 million. Even by the time of Carillion, Paul had more than 300 workers on the books all over the West Midlands. His attempts to save his business ended in a nervous breakdown.

“We couldn’t pay the men, we couldn’t pay suppliers and we couldn’t pay for the plant. The dominoes came tumbling down. I’ve taken some hits in business in my time but Carillion put me over the edge. It broke me.”

After nearly 20 years in business almost everything that he and his wife Steph built has gone. The nest egg for their retirement — gone. The properties they bought when business was booming — gone. The cars they had through the business — gone.

What’s keeping them going is what’s left of their savings and the £70 a week Steph got on jobseeker’s allowance for a while. In 40 years working she’s never claimed what she still calls “the dole.” Paul went to sign on but couldn’t bring himself to do it.

“To be honest, if you ask me what happened with Carillion, frankly I’d say it was organised crime. But the big people get away with it. And it’s the small people like us, who pay the price.”

Enter Richard Adam — one of the big people. He was Carillion’s director of finance for 10 years. He left in December 2017, a year before Carillion went down — funnily enough.

On March 1, 2017, the first time he could cash in some of his share options, when the accounts went public, he did just that. That brought in £534,000. Nice one on top of his 2016 top line of £1.1m. The next date he could sell the remainder of his share options was May 1. So he did just that. Again. That raised £242,000 this time. That meant his shares sell-off totalled £776,000.

That was two months before an £845 million hole showed up in Carillion’s books. By the end of 2017 the hole became more than a billion. When asked, Adam said everything was fine when he left. He never saw the crash coming. No-one could he said.

If you believe that you’ll believe anything.

When Carillion went bust it had an alleged turnover topping £5 billion and contracts in the pipeline supposedly worth £41bn. But when the real numbers were crunched all those lies added up to debts reaching £7bn and a £2.6bn deficit in the workers’ pension fund. It’s official that 30,000 subcontractors, like Paul, were owed £2bn.

As January 15 approached, it was looking like no-one was ever going to be held accountable — because the third anniversary was also the deadline for any legal action to be taken against the directors.

Then, out of the blue, the day before the deadline, the Insolvency Service, which handled the Carillion liquidation, announced that the government had launched legal proceedings to disqualify eight former Carillion directors, on the grounds that they were “unfit to manage a company.”

The action includes Adam and the former chief executives, Richard Howson and Keith Cochrane. All the directors could face bans of between two and 15 years if the court action is successful.

The STUC, GMB and Unite have been big supporters of my book Bandit Capitalism: Carillion and the Corruption of the British State, so when the news about the legal action dropped I phoned Roz Foyer, the STUC’s general secretary.

She welcomed the move but added: “The three years of silence on Carillion were beginning to look like yet another business cover-up with no-one held to account for the catastrophe. The Establishment have a way of circling the wagons in times of crisis.

“For once, at some point in the future, the relentless looting of government contracts by big business, combined with fiddling the books to cover that up, might face a possible legal penalty.”

But make no mistake the STUC is continuing its public pressure for a public inquiry. She told me, “At a public inquiry people who appear have to give evidence on oath. That’s the only chance we have of getting to the truth of what really happened at Carillion.”

“As well as the directors who looted the company for tens of millions facing potential sanctions, the auditors who permanently looked the other way when the balance sheets became financial fiction, the regulators who collaborated in the cover-ups and the government ministers who did nothing about all of that, still have to answer for Carillion.

“That’s the road to the truth for those who have paid the price for all the greed, the lies and the injustice.”

Bob Kylie is the author of Bandit Capitalism — Carillion and the corruption of the British State www.birlinn.co.uk/product/bandit-capitalism.