A businessman who became notorious for sacking his staff by text message has been killed in a car accident in Spain.

Mark Langford, 42, the former head of The Accident Group (TAG), died just weeks after the High Court in London was told he was too depressed to attend a bankruptcy hearing over a £4.1 million tax bill.

Mr Langford had moved to Spain after his company collapsed with debts of £100 million in May 2003. The failure led to 2,700 workers being made redundant by a text message that read: “Urgent. Unfortunately salaries not paid. Please do not contact office.”

Friends said that Mr Langford had become increasingly dejected after he and his wife, Debbie, a fellow former director, were served with summonses for unpaid tax in February.

Bailiffs acting for Revenue & Customs served the writs, which demanded £2.4 million from Mrs Langford, 41, while the couple celebrated their daughter’s birthday on their luxury yacht in a marina close to Marbella, southern Spain.

Spanish police said yesterday that they could not discuss the cause of the crash on the A7 motorway in the Costa del Sol.

Jackie Brennon, a former director of TAG, dismissed rumours yesterday that Mr Longford had deliberately crashed his car.

“He died because he was thrown from the car because he was not wearing a seat-belt. It is as simple as that,” she told The Times. “The persecution of Mark Langford has been terrible. Everybody wanted him to die. He had become very poorly. He was very depressed.”

Mr Langford made up to £75 million from TAG, a pioneer of the “no-win, no-fee” legal claims for personal injury accidents. However, the company’s slogan “Where there’s blame, there’s a claim” appeared not to apply to the boss when the company collapsed after experiencing lower-than-expected claims success rates.

As staff began ransacking TAG offices in Manchester, Bir-mingham and Leicester, Mr Longford and his family disappeared to Spain, where they forged a new life befitting multi-millionaires among the designer shops andgolf clubs of Marbella.

Meanwhile, his staff were left without redundancy payments and trade unions used the company’s demise to press home calls for stronger employment laws. Ministers brought in new rights to compel companies to consult staff over major changes affecting their future to prevent similar cases.

Alec McFadden, a trade union worker who represented-sacked TAG workers, said: “I am sad that a man has died, but it’s right to say that the people I represent had their lives turned upside down by the actions of a company that Mark Langford was in charge of.

“I think he had started to realise that he would have to answer for the things he had done in his life.”

In addition to bankruptcy proceedings, Mr Langford was facing moves by the Department of Trade and Industry to ban him from acting as a company director. Three other company directors have already been disqualified.

After the company’s collapse, an employment tribunal condemned senior management for “cynically manipulating” their staff.

But Mr Langford maintained that he was not an evil boss and was believed to have been planning to set the record straight by telling his side of the story.

In recent months he had been disposing of his major assets, including a £1.2 million Spanish villa and a £1.5 million, 80ft (25m) yacht, Mermaid’s Whisper. The couple had also put their 23-acre estate at North Rode, Cheshire, on the market, at £3.75 million for the five-bedroom manor house with indoor pool, Jacuzzi and gym plus a paddock and lake.

And, although Mr Langford had previously enjoyed driving a Bentley convertible with personalised plates, a Ferrari and a Porsche, he was not thought to own any vehicles at the time of his death. He was driving a rented Opel Corsa on a slip road of the A7 between Puerto Banus and Malaga when it smashed through a crash barrier and careered 20ft up a grass bank, A police source said: “Drivers often leave the motorway at this junction at high speed and have to brake heavily as they approach a roundabout. The cause of the crash is thought to be excessive speed given the wet conditions.”

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