An accounts manager is to be prosecuted on suspicion of misleading The Pensions Regulator by trying to hide a failure to provide workplace pensions at a string of restaurants.

Bradford-based Mansoor Nasir is accused of submitting false declarations of workplace pension compliance to The Pensions Regulator.

He is alleged to have done this on behalf of nine linked food businesses that he was the payroll adviser for, between September 2014 and May 2017.

The businesses were various “Akbar” restaurants in Birmingham, Manchester, Yorkshire and the North East.

Mr Nasir, who works at Beaumont Management Services in Duncombe Road, Bradford, faces nine charges of “knowingly or recklessly providing The Pensions Regulator with information which was false or misleading, contrary to section 80 of the Pensions Act 2004.”

He has been summonsed to appear at Brighton Magistrates’ Court on 9 January.

If convicted the offence carries a maximum sentence in a magistrates cost of an unlimited fine and in the Crown Court a fine of up to two years’ imprisonment.