The Insolvency Service has secured a four-year director disqualification against Suzanne Harley-Davies in the latest action arising from the Atherton corporate rescue scheme. The Secretary of State for Business and Trade accepted her disqualification undertaking, which took effect on 6 May 2026. According to the government announcement, Harley-Davies served as a director of Namare GRP Ltd and TPG GRP Limited while those companies were being used in support of the Atherton model. The case is framed not as participation in designing the scheme, but as a failure to carry out the oversight expected of a company director.
The Atherton scheme was presented as an alternative to formal insolvency for directors of distressed businesses. Instead of entering liquidation or another statutory process, company owners were encouraged to sell their businesses for £1, pay fees of between £5,000 and £20,000, and leave new owners and directors in place. The Insolvency Service said that arrangement allowed original directors to walk away from company debts while keeping personal assets and avoiding the scrutiny that comes with formal insolvency proceedings. In policy terms, that point is central: insolvency law is intended to test conduct, identify assets and protect creditors, rather than provide a private route out of debt.
In the government’s account, Harley-Davies failed to exercise control over the affairs of both companies during 2023 and 2024 and failed to ensure that they were operating for legitimate corporate purposes. She was a director of Namare GRP Ltd from July 2023 to July 2024 and a director of TPG GRP Limited from September 2023 to July 2024. The announcement also states that she made only limited enquiries into what the companies were doing and did not take sufficient steps to satisfy herself that they were acting reasonably. Dave Magrath, the Insolvency Service’s Director of Investigation and Enforcement Services, said the case underlined a basic rule of company law: accepting a directorship brings active responsibilities, even where a director says they were not involved in creating or promoting the underlying scheme.
The two companies were wound up in the public interest in 2024 and entered compulsory liquidation in August that year following Insolvency Service investigations. Public-interest winding-up is one of the stronger enforcement measures available where a company is judged to be operating against the public good rather than merely failing as a business. The scale of activity helps explain that intervention. The Insolvency Service said Namare GRP Ltd became sole owner and person with significant control of at least 171 companies while Harley-Davies was one of its directors. TPG GRP Limited did not acquire additional companies during her tenure, but it already owned at least 58 when she joined the board. The government said all of those companies had been acquired through the Atherton scheme.
This decision sits within a wider sequence of enforcement. Harley-Davies’ co-director, Neville Taylor, was disqualified for nine years in January 2025 after Insolvency Service findings that he had been paid more than £250,000 to become sole director of 12 financially distressed companies during 2022 and 2023. The agency said Taylor made inadequate attempts to identify assets worth more than £8 million from 11 of those companies before they entered liquidation. In October 2025, Karen Mortimer and Joanna Seawright were each disqualified for seven years after, according to the Insolvency Service, placing creditors of 138 companies at risk of financial loss. Atherton Corporate UK (Ltd) and Atherton Corporate Rescue Limited were shut down at the same time as Namare GRP Ltd and TPG GRP Limited, while four other linked companies were closed earlier in 2026.
For directors, the practical message is straightforward. A board appointment is not a nominal role, and a claim of limited involvement will not by itself answer a finding that a company was being used for improper purposes. The legal expectation is active oversight: asking questions, checking ownership changes, understanding transactions and making sure the company is being managed lawfully. For creditors and compliant businesses, that matters because schemes of this kind can shift losses away from those responsible and onto suppliers, customers, lenders and HMRC. The Insolvency Service has presented this line of enforcement as part of its wider work to improve director conduct and preserve fair conditions for businesses that follow the insolvency rules.
The immediate effect of the undertaking is that Harley-Davies cannot, without permission of the court, be involved in the promotion, formation or management of a company for four years. That is one of the standard restrictions attached to director disqualification and is intended to reduce the risk of repeat misconduct. In practical terms, the case is another warning to directors approached by informal debt exit arrangements marketed as a substitute for liquidation. The government’s position in this enforcement round is that formal insolvency procedures exist for a reason: they create accountability, allow scrutiny of conduct and give creditors protections that private side arrangements do not.