Cambridge Finally Gets Closure

Cambridge City Council now knows it won’t see any of the £618,000 (then $906,000) it lost when ticketing company Secure Ticket (UK) tanked at the end of 2008.

Secure Ticket’s Mohammed Rashid Qajar and Sally Oakley, who sold online tickets for Cambridge Folk Festival in 2007 and 2008, have been banned from serving as company directors for 10 years.

They’d failed to keep the money in a separate account and spent it, apparently mistaking it for a similar amount of money that was due from investors. The investors’ money never materialised.

“This case is especially grave because the damage will have reverberated through a community,” said chief insolvency examiner Mark Bruce. “People living in the Cambridge area will have suffered indirectly from a reduction in funds available to the council.”

Secure Ticket (UK), which sold about 60 percent of the festival’s 10,000 tickets, went into voluntary liquidation a couple of days before Cambridge City Council was to wind it up.

It went down with debts in the region of £4.5 million. Teraventus, which promotes Scotland’s 12,000-capacity Retrofest, and Musical Associates – which promotes shows at stately homes – also took heavy losses.

There is no connection between Secure Ticket (UK) and Hull-based ticketing firm Secure Ticket.