SENTENCING STATEMENTS

On sentencing Lord Harrower made the following remarks in court:

"Barry Kenneth Mackland, on 3 July 2025, at the High Court in Edinburgh, you were found guilty of three charges of fraud, and one of theft carried out between February and June 2022.  The charges all arose out of your business in buying and selling plant and machinery, for use in the groundcare, agricultural and construction industries. 

You operated on your own account and also through a firm called North East Plant Sales (Scotland) Limited.  As the company name implied, your business was carried out primarily in the north-east of Scotland.  However, you sourced and supplied equipment throughout Scotland, and indeed further afield.  One complainer to whom you promised to supply a JCB Telehandler was based in Lincolnshire.  He paid you £52,200 but never got his machine.  He tried to ask you where it was but you refused to take his calls.  Other evidence showed that you operated Europe-wide.  In a charge that was ultimately withdrawn, a customer in Denmark complained that he hadn’t received his Takeuchi digger. 

You were not the con-man who tricks an unsuspecting stranger out of his money and is never seen again.  Most of your customers had dealt with you over many years.  These dealings were based almost entirely on trust, and for many years your business appears to have flourished.  However, when things started to go wrong for you, as they did in the Spring of 2022, your wheeling and dealing exposed your customers to unacceptable levels of risk. 

You may not have been robbing Peter to pay Paul, but you fraudulently exploited your customers’ good will in an increasingly desperate attempt to keep your business going.  It is telling perhaps that the jury returned a not proven verdict in relation to one particular complainer with whom you had formed a business relationship akin to partnership.  While a partner might reasonably be expected to share in partnership losses, the same cannot be said for complainers with whom you transacted at arm’s length.   

Mr Mackland, you are now 50 years’ old.  Although you have previous convictions, they are for relatively minor, unrelated, offences committed almost 20 years ago.  To all intents and purposes, you are a first offender.  I have taken account of everything said on your behalf by Mr Moggach and in the pre-sentencing report.   It is clear from that report that you continue to struggle to accept responsibility for your offending. 

As I said to you when you were convicted, these were serious crimes, and they have caused losses of over £600,000 to several individuals and companies.  Some customers, having traced their equipment, discovered that it had been made subject to the prior claims of a finance company.  It is unclear from the information available to me how much, if anything, they will be able to recover in the liquidation of your company or in your own sequestration. 

I bear in mind also that, as a result of your conviction, you are now subject to proceeds of crime proceedings.  Fraud on this scale causes damage to the business community generally in Scotland, since it erodes the essential basis of trust on which all commerce depends.  In my view, a substantial prison sentence is inevitable.  The prosecution proceeded on the basis that you were engaged in a single course of criminal conduct.  I will therefore sentence you in respect of all charges in cumulo to a term of imprisonment of 5 years, beginning from today.