A firm hiring blind staff went bust - but its mission lives on
Over its long history, Clarity's patrons have included Queen Victoria and actress Joanna Lumley.However, in 2020, a big shortfall in its pension fund caused the business to collapse, and a man called Nicholas Marks bought the company out of administration, promising to keep the business going.It didn't turn out that way."He wasn't interested in growing jobs for disabled people and even protecting the jobs for the disabled people that we had working with us, which was truly heart-breaking to watch unfold," says Camilla Marcus-Dew, who was the company's head of commercial.The workers, many of them blind or visually impaired, were laid off, and didn't get the wages, furlough or redundancy payments they were owed. The factory closed and the company was shut down for good — owing more than £400,000 to 84 employees.Shortly after the BBC reported on the story, Marks took Marcus-Dew and another person to court, wrongly blaming them for the company's problems. After a long legal battle, the case was thrown out.The pensions regulator then charged Marks with fraudulently taking workers' pensions, but he died before that case came to court.
