A company co-owned by the billionaire Issa brothers who are buying Asda was fined for "appalling" safety breaches, it has emerged.
A BBC investigation found that one worker lost a finger in a bubble wrap machine in 2012, and another lost four fingers in 2015, weeks after the brothers resigned as directors of Europlast (Blackburn) Ltd. The company reportedly showed "a total lack of care about the safety of its employees", according to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE).
In 2014, the Lancashire packaging firm was fined £50,000 at Preston Crown Court for an incident two years previously, when a worker got a hand trapped between rollers while trying to clean a bubble wrap machine. He suffered burns and crush injuries, requiring skin grafts, and lost the top half of his middle finger.
Mohsin and Zuber Issa, the billionaire petrol station bosses who have recently acquired Asda for £ 6.8bn were co-owners and directors of the company at the time, according to filings at Companies House. Two months after Mohsin and Zuber Issa resigned, in August 2015, another worker lost four fingers while cleaning a bubble wrap machine. The company was prosecuted and pleaded guilty to this incident in 2017, paying a fine of £60,000.
The court was told of two previous hand injuries at the company, which had been warned as early as 2009 of the need to guard dangerous machine parts, according to a press release issued by the HSE.
