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Monday, March 15, 2010
Chris Gray
The entrepreneur behind a new regional airline that stopped flying after only eight days has admitted creating a fictional financial backer, according to a weekend report.
Martin Halstead created the fake name Will Gilligan when he found that his own attempts to interest suppliers in his Varsity Express venture met with little success.
Halstead, who was behind another start-up airline, Alpha One, which founded in 2006 after six weeks, admitted a series of failings to the Sunday Times.
He told the paper: “I have allowed things to happen I should not have allowed to happen.”
According to the paper, Halstead used the fake name to drum up interest from suppliers because his initial approaches under his own name were not getting replies.
One of his associates in launching the business, David Lawrence, was disqualified from being a company director three years ago.
The pair offered jobs to pilots on the basis that they paid up to £15,000 each to be trained in the Jetsteam aircraft they were using to fly between Oxford and Edinburgh. Pilots told the paper they paid the money into Halstead’s personal bank account.
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