Speaker Peter Meredith

Peter said that one of his first jobs in the profession was to do an audit of a brewery in Leeds. He asked the Company Secretary to see the minutes book. The Secretary was an elderly gentleman and said, “nobody has ever asked to see that before” and then promptly collapsed. An ambulance had to be called to take him to hospital. This made Peter suspicious, and he spent 4 days carefully reviewing everything in the minute book but everything was in perfect order.

Another client the firm acted for was a very rich family in Bradford. One of the family was an old spinster whose actions were sometimes a bit strange. For example, she would go to her bank and draw out a reasonable amount of cash in £5 notes. She would then come into the office and get a member of staff to count out the exact amount she owed in rates money to the council. Then she went to the council offices with the cash in a carrier bag to pay her rates bill. She also had around 10 paintings, and she decided she wanted to give one to each grandchild. The trouble was that some were very valuable, and others weren’t worth anything. Peter’s firm had to persuade her to sell all the paintings so that each child could be treated equitably.

Another audit was of what Peter described as a weird club bottom Leeds Road. He sent Alan Arthur there to start the job, but Alan discovered that activities were taking place that at the time were illegal. He quickly left and reported back. A partners meeting was held to discuss the matter, and it was decided that the firm wouldn’t act for the club.

Finally, the firm had 3 clients who were selling a successful business in Midlands for quite a lot of money. Peter was having a meeting with the 3 of them to establish if they needed any help in relation to what they were going to do with their share of the money. One of them a 6 feet 3 inch married man with 3 grown up children said yes he needed tax and pension advice as he was going to spend some of his money on having a sex change. Peter found out that this would immediately dissolve his marriage as at that time 2 people of the same sex could not be married. Also, he would stop receiving the married man’s allowance and pay a single person tax. However, he would still get male pension as that is based on your sex at birth and if he died his ex-wife would get the widow pension. Whenever he came in office he had to wear women’s clothes for 2 year before he could have sex change which caused a problem on which toilet facility he could use. This was overcome by declaring the client facility as gender neutral.