Revealed: pageant labour boss conviction

The head of the firm at the centre of the row over unpaid workers at the Queen’s Jubilee was convicted of perverting the course of justice after an incident which left a man in a coma, it has emerged.

Molly Prince admitted she was handed a 12-month suspended sentence after refusing to testify against the attackers and “copped a plea of perverting the course of justice” over the incident, in which she said a man in Huddersfield was beaten with a stick.

The news comes days after The Independent revealed that Close Protection UK, which was criticised after workfare staff it used at the royal pageant had to sleep under London Bridge, won a contract to run fire safety and security services at the Olympic Games.

Ms Prince said the incident occurred after a member of staff at the pub she ran in Yorkshire complained of being beaten by her partner. According to Ms Prince, writing in the book Bouncers and Bodyguards: Tales from a Twilight World by Robin Barratt, she and two men accompanied the staff member home and the group encountered the boyfriend accused of the beating.

She wrote that the two men with her chased him and she was later informed they had beaten him into a coma. “I believe he never fully recovered,” she said of the incident, which took place in the mid-1990s. She was not charged with assault, but admitted perverting the course of justice on the advice of her barrister.

Lord Prescott said: “This is really beginning to smell now”. He said the revelations, first reported on the Political Scrapbook blog, proved that the “Government and Locog didn’t do due diligence on Molly Prince and CPUK when they awarded the firm the contracts. I await the Home Secretary’s urgent response to my calls for an investigation into this matter.”

A spokesman for Ms Prince said the revelations “have led to her being mis-characterised”. The publicist Max Clifford, who released a statement on her behalf, said: “Molly agreed to plead guilty to perverting the course of justice at the Crown Court to bring an end to the matter. With hindsight, she admits this was the wrong thing to do.”