Big names in the frame as OFT hands out punishment

Kier Group, the public sector contractor and housebuilder, received the highest single fine, of £17.8 million.

That is nearly three times the value of its biggest rip-off, the construction of a £6.3 million warehouse built in 2005 for Suffolk brewer Adnams.

The fine is a massive embarrassment and will be a significant cost for Kier group.

It is currently working on the country's new Supreme Court building across Parliament Square from the House of Lords, a flagship project about which chief executive John Dodds — during his company's full-year results last week — was boasting of how well-regarded his company is by Government.

However, those results showed how much the fine will hurt Kier: its underlying profits for last year crashed 40% to £52 million — just three times the value of the OFT fine.

The £5.2 million fine for Balfour Beatty would have been double but for the company's decision to confess the sins of its subsidiary Mansell.

But the OFT fine is just the latest in a string of controversies for the company.

It was part of the Metronet Underground consortium which failed ignominiously last year. Separately, last year, it was also fined £2.25 million by the Serious Fraud Office for offering bribes in Egypt. Most notoriously it was fined

£7.5 million for its role as the track maintenance company in the 2000 fatal Hatfield derailment.

The second largest OFT penalty, a fine of £11.6 million, went to Interserve whose contracts include a maintenance role at Buckingham Palace as well as widespread build-and-manage contracts across the NHS, the Ministry of Defence and the education sector.

Like Kier, Interserve received no "leniency" discount on its fines granted by the OFT for companies that helped it with its inquiries at an early stage.

Another quoted firm, Galliford Try, best known for its reconstruction work on the Gothic landmark building at St Pancras, received no leniency either in being fined

£8.3 million. That represents about one third of its profits which crashed by 60% last year. It recently announced plans for a £125 million rights issue.

Yet another quoted company, Connaught, was fined a total of £5.6 million, equivalent to around one quarter of last year's total profits.