THE work of the county's trading standards team has been praised after a city firm was prosecuted for its use of unfair and misleading sales practices.

Five of those involved with Saint Frances Marketing Limited pleaded guilty and were sentenced at Exeter Crown Court for offences under consumer protection legislation.

As reported in the Echo, Carol Small and Karen Henthorne of Ide Lane, Exeter, Mark Herbert of Huntspill, Somerset, and brothers Michael and John Girvin, of Exmouth, pleaded guilty to specimen charges under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008.

This included falsely telling consumers they could not cancel their holiday purchase contracts when they had bought them using cancellable credit agreements; misleadingly stating the firm would buy the products back at their original purchase price after two years, and falsely saying the offer to buy a product was only available at the time of attending a presentation.

Judge Philip Wassall said the practices were "wholesale and systematic" and indicated that their "customers" had in fact been their "victims".

The five were sentenced to a three-year conditional discharge and ordered to pay costs of £150,000.

Devon Trading Standards had previously obtained formal undertakings not to mislead consumers from two of the defendants, Carol Small and Mark Herbert. This was in relation to a previous company, Easysave Finance Limited, trading as Leisuretime Promotions or Buena Viva.

However, when the new company started operating in 2008, complaints continued and a number of warrants were executed in January 2009 to gather evidence.

County councillor Roger Croad, Cabinet member with responsibility for Trading Standards, said: "This case involved an immense amount of hard work by the Trading Standards Service. This was a complex, commercial set-up designed to mislead consumers."