A waste disposal firm boss accused of dumping shares in the business just before their price collapsed insisted he was going to sell them anyway.

Neil Rollins, 46, avoided huge personal losses by selling 74,000 stocks in the Shipley-based PM Group PLC weeks before the company announced it was in trouble, it is claimed.

Just ten days after he disposed of his stake in September, 2006, their value plummeted by almost half, Southwark Crown Court has heard.

Prosecutors say Rollins, the manufacturing director at PM Onboard Ltd (PMO), the PM Group’s waste disposal wing, knew that the company was struggling.

Rollins, of Flappit Springs, Keighley, denies five counts of insider dealing and four counts of transferring criminal property between August 22 and November 28, 2006.

He allegedly ignored strict instructions from the firm’s top management that no employee should trade on the markets in the two-month ‘closed period’ before its financial difficulties were announced to the public.

It is further claimed that he encouraged his wife Louisa to sell her stake in the firm, and laundered £120,000 he made from selling his shares through his father David’s bank account.

Rollins was sacked on September 12, 2006 after his company found out he had been selling his stock, and he sold his remaining shares the following day.

On September 19 the PM Group published its detailed results, setting out the ‘disappointing’ outlook, triggering a collapse in the share price from 230p in mid September to 131p by the end of the month. But in his evidence to the court, Rollins insisted that he had been planning to sell his shareholding since March, 2006, long before the closed period.

The married father-of-two accepted he was in possession of inside information about the PM Group, but said this did not influence his decision to get rid of his stake.

His barrister Gareth Rees, QC, asked him: ‘You accept that you were an insider? You accept that you dealt in shares: shares which apply to the law we are dealing with?

“In the summer of 2006 until you were sacked in the middle of September, did you think the information that you had was inside information?’ Rollins answered ‘yes, that’s correct’ to each question.

When Mr Rees asked him whether he had dealt in those shares because of that inside information, he replied: ‘No.’ Asked why he had sold the shares, Rollins said: “Because the share price was falling.”

The trial continues