Would be interesting to know whether he had been a genuine member of scheme previously and let membership lapse?
You may well be right, but I feel that considering the sentence imposed, there is a higher probability that he had never been a SELECT member, an NICEIC approved contractor, or an SBS approved certifier in the first place. If so, he would have saved somewhere in the region of £2500 through not having to pay his initial application/membership fees and annual subscription to both organisations. He would also have avoided having to shell-out on doing the course that would have qualified him as an approved certifier and paying the annual fee required by the Scottish Government.
I'm not a gambling man, but if I had to wager, I would bet that the guy did what he did to gain an unfair trading advantage over honest competitors as an act of business survival. The domestic market in the central belt of Scotland is absolutely teeming with qualified electricians, under qualified electricians and people with no qualifications at all in electrical installation, all competing for the same jobs. Competition is cuthroat.
Indeed, I operate in Glasgow, but regularly lose jobs to muppets who are happy to travel from Edinburgh (100 miles round trip), Perth (120 miles round trip), Dundee (165 miles round trip) to install a couple of sockets. I'm not kidding. This is the harsh reality of domestic electrical contracting in Scotland.
Perhaps the incarcerated electrician also had to compete against the same twentysomething, 'still living with parents, I get all my work from My Builder muppets' that I do and became desperate for jobs. Desperate people tend to do desperate things. Unfortunately for him, he has made a big mistake and paid the penalty for his folly.
As for Trading Standards ..... just who are they protecting here, vulnerable customers, or the revenue streams of NICEIC, SELECT and the Scottish Government? The latter seems to be the case from my viewpoint.