Strip club fined over unpaid tax

A Worcester strip club has been fined almost £30,000 over its two-year unpaid tax bill.

Worcester’s Black Cherry Gentlemen’s Club has been named and shamed by HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) for owing almost £65,000 in tax.

HMRC’s current list of ‘deliberate tax defaulters’ shows the strip club in the city’s Lowesmoor has been ordered to pay just over £29,500 in penalties for its unpaid tax bills between August 2017 and November 2019.

According to Companies House documents, strip club owner David Barrett has been attempting to dissolve the company since February 2019 with the latest attempt in June 2021.

Companies House also said the city centre strip club’s accounts for the last financial year are also overdue.

He applied for ‘compulsory strike-off’ in February 2019 – which would mean the company would be dissolved – but was rejected.

Another application was made in May that year but was again rejected.

A new application was made again in June 2021 and again rejected because of the unpaid tax bill.

Companies are added to HMRC’s list for a number of reasons including deliberately providing inaccurate documents, deliberately failing to comply with an HMRC obligation or “committing a VAT or excise wrongdoing.”

The most common reason for a company strike-off procedure being rejected is if HMRC believe that the company has unpaid tax such as VAT or corporation tax.

The city’s only strip club was brought under new ownership in 2017 after the company that ran the venue entered administration over an unpaid tax bill.

HMRC said Black Cherry was not paying VAT on money that it held for dancers from card machine payments and advised the strip club it needed to treat the payments as company turnover, in an inspection in 2016.

Black Cherry Entertainment Limited, run by Ashvin Patel, owed HMRC almost £85,000 in 2017, according to a document on the Companies House website.

It also shows that the business and its assets were sold to Black Cherry Gentleman’s Club Limited, which is owned by David Barrett, for £10,000 in August 2017.