The wife of a ski slope boss who used a scheme to avoid debts made a claim for more than £30,000 in redundancy money.
Wealthy Jamie Smith, 55, left a trail of debt when his Snow Factor venue at Braehead shut down in November 2022.
He infuriated staff by paying for paying for a patsy director to supposedly take over the company – and the debts – while he disappeared to Greece to run a yacht tour business.
The Daily Record has told how the replacement director then simply ignored all correspondence from staff and creditors, allowing the business to die.
Staff at Snow Factor are still chasing redundancy payments after their shameful treatment.
We can now reveal that Smith repeated the trick at his other famous business – the Ice Factor National Ice Climbing Centre in Kinlochleven – where he amassed more debt then exited.
Another replacement director was installed in place of him as the Ice Factor closed down in March, 2023.
Many staff members at the site – the world’s biggest indoor ice wall – worked for several weeks without pay as it lurched towards closure.
But they were angered to see that Smith’s wife Tracey – the Ice Factor’s operations manager – put in her own redundancy claim against the bogus new director after Jamie resigned.
The absent new director of the doomed company simply ignored the £31,000 claim, leaving the government’s Redundancy Payments Service – funded by taxpayers – to pick up any statutory pay-outs.
One staff member said: “People were astonished when Tracey had the brass neck to make a claim for redundancy cash, given the way Jamie had behaved.
“She was effectively making a claim against a mysterious new director, who’d avoided correspondence related to the business. That meant she could await a statutory pay-out from the government instead.
“Every worker believed her to know exactly what was going on at Ice Factor, as she was Ops Manager and she was Jamie’s wife.”
The source added: “Jamie had been spending a lot of time in Greece to set up his yachting business before the Snow Factor and Ice Factor both crashed. He had his eyes on a new life.”
It is believed Tracey Smith has been paid out the redundancy element, of almost £14,000.
Like other staff, she could only seek payouts for breach of contract, holiday pay and unauthorised deductions when the company is wound up.
After the Snow Factor was shut down, staff at the sister Ice Factor wall in Kinlochleven demanded talks with Smith about their future.
He is claimed to have asked them, at a meeting in November 2022, to work for nothing while he ironed out cash flow problems.
One instructor at Ice Factor posted on social media: “All staff were told that the situation at Snow Factor meant that Ice Factor’s money had been seized as an asset to pay off debt inherited by SF’s new owner.
“This meant no staff would be getting paid for hours worked in November.
“All staff were given a choice, continue working for free in the hope that IF’s owners could win a court case to re-obtain these assets and continue to run the business.
“The other choice was to take what money was in the centre safe and leave, effectively terminating our employment.”
He added: “It’s worth noting that there was not enough money in the centre safe to pay staff wages and no members of staff received any payment on Saturday the 26th November.”
As a result, many staff walked out the next day.
Instructors were later told they were, in fact, officially employed by Snow Factor’s new owner, which made all instructional staff redundant on November 15, without any communication or notice – meaning they’d been working for nothing.
The employee added: “We were then firmly told by the owner of IF that he no longer has anything to do with us and owed us no money. Essentially, all Ice Factor instructional staff have been made redundant with no pay.”
Another employee added: “Jamie Smith’s take on things was delusional as he kept saying that nothing was his fault.
“He never mentioned that he paid thousands of pounds to get in fake
directors, whose only real function was to take liabilities off his slate and do nothing to save the jobs.”
Tracey’s redundancy claim against Ice Factor (Kinlochleven) Limited was awarded in her favour at an Employment Tribunal chaired by Judge Frances Eccles.
No one representing the company responded to the claim – in similar fashion to scores of other claims made by workers formerly employed by Smith.
The Daily Record has previously told that Smith and two other directors face a probe into what happened to £2million in assets, allegedly moved from one of Smith’s companies to others.
Liquidators of Snow Factor Ltd are pursuing a “misfeasance” action against the directors, which alleged the cash and other assets were wrongly taken out of the reach of creditors. They are demanding the return of the assets or say legal action will follow.
Jamie and Tracey Smith have been asked to comment. Jamie earlier denied any wrongdoing. He said in an email the claims put to him were made by disgruntled former employees. He claimed that a senior investigator from the Insolvency Service had compiled a report that would not result in any disqualification action.
He said he and his wife have recently become estranged.