COLIN’S CARS PRIVATE HIRE SERVICE 55 NORTHGATE, CLECKHEATON
VERTICAL BLINDS
Phone: 01274 862222
3 FOR
£89 SALE 046 1502
24-HOUR SERVICE Your Local, Reliable and Friendly Taxi Service!
Tel: 0800
01274 305 410
ONE PAPER ... ALL THE NEWS from Dewsbury, Batley, Ossett, Mirfield, Liversedge, Birstall, Heckmondwike, Cleckheaton & Spen Valley
Friday May 22, 2015
12 MONTHS GUARANTEE
No. 686
50p
HW RIVALS
READY TO CLASH AT COAST
SPORT
Zyla’s a smiler Competition winners’ joy
p3
180 JOBS AT RISK AS BED FIRM FOLDS By Staff Reporters
THE RAVENSTHORPE bed firm linked to a human trafficking scandal has gone into administration with debts said to be as high as £20 million.
Wake up and smell the Coppi Celebrating cycling heritage in Mirfield p5
Around 180 employees at Kozee Sleep Beds Ltd, based on the Ravensthorpe Industrial Estate, were sent home this week after KPMG administrators were sent in to take over the business. Managing director Mohammed Rafiq, 59, is currently awaiting trial at Leeds Crown Court along with two fellow Kozee Sleep staff, Mohammed Patel, 39, and Mohamed Dadhiwala, 46, on human trafficking-related charges. The firm was at the centre of a case that created national headlines when Hungarian slave-masters Janos Orsos, 43, and Ferenc Iles, 25, were jailed for five and three years, for a
large-scale human trafficking operation. Kozee Sleep, which had major contracts to supply beds for companies Next and John Lewis until the scandal broke, was employing staff through Orsos and Iles, who police running Operation Tavernhouse found were being kept in overcrowded conditions across the district and paid as little as £2 per day. Although Rafiq, who is married to the sister of controversial Dewsbury businessman and political fixer Tahir ‘Terry’ Zaman, denied knowledge of the trafficked workers, further raids by Operation Tavernhouse officers led to charges being brought. This week a member of the Kozee Sleep staff, speaking on the condition
of anonymity, said they had feared something was coming to a head. “There have been frantic shipments of stock in the last few weeks, to other bed companies in the district, virtually emptying the place,” he said. “These weren’t to customers, but to other local firms. “The rumours have been flying around. On Tuesday night we were told that Terry (Zaman) had offered the bank £11 million to buy back the company and that we might keep our jobs. Now everything is up in the air.” Kozee Sleep is part of a web of businesses that began trading as the Hick Lane Bedding Company in Batley in 1992. Shortly after it moved to the Ravensthorpe site, Terry Zaman, who has a string of convictions over the running of various other interests in
Continues on page 2