I would literally bet the farm that Richard Saillet had been operating for decades before I ever had the misfortune to know him. The way he operated during the time I rented his mooring and lived next to him and his wife/business partner was insane. He had about six scrappy cars off the road parked all over the compound, and burner mobiles in each. You'd come in after dark and he'd be sat in one of the cars on a phone laughing and making hand gestures, and would look like a rabbit caught in the headlights when he spotted you.
He was prolific on dating sites (Plenty of Fish and likely others) and would always be getting caught out by his wife trying to arrange meets with some seriously elderly women. He and his wife had only been married a few months at that point, and they had only been together a couple of years-having met on a dating site.
One memorable time as he was driving out of the car park to go to a trade show, one of the shop staff had just found one of these burners and taken it to his wife. She went through it and found that this "trade show" overnighter was actually a meet from a dating site, and chased him out of the car park as he pulled away, waving the phone behind him as he burned off and screaming at him.
All this was totally standard behavior for him, and that I witnessed first with my own eyes, not rumours from the towpath.
I left his mooring in 2015 when the business was spiralling down-the shop was half empty because the suppliers had all cut him off for non-payment, and the shop staff weren't being paid, despite him going to Gambia (where he has a house) regularly for holidays. The office was full of piled up final demands and court notices, you literally couldn't miss spotting them as soon as you walked in it was so bad. The admin girls used to spend pretty much all day lying to creditors on the phone. At that point they were working hard at separating EcoToilets both on paper and in practice, moving it to a new premises in Leicester, presumably to avoid it being taken down by the Canal Shop's debt as it went.
But the EcoToilets business was/is 100% him, his baby, his grand plan to retire rich.
I left the moorings in 2015, because I didn't feel safe there and I was very clear with Richard that that was the reason. He had three online moorings adjacent to the shop in a row nose to tail with no other boats or people within shouting distance after shop hours, with me in the middle. He was moored on the one side of me, and for a while (although not at the time that I left-he had been booted out for being too gobby about the shit Richard got up to) moored on the other side was a convicted sex offender. He also had a friendship/business dealings with a man that I in no way ironically refer to as the devil, who had previously physically threatened me over (no seriously) my asking him to return a plate he had borrowed.
When I was eventually told that the guy behind me is a convicted sex offender who has to sign in but please don't tell anyone, I confronted Richard about mooring me (a single woman) next to him, knowing that the only way off my boat was past his, and that often he and I were the only ones there.
Richard Saillet asked me why I was worried about being moored next a paedophile given that I was hardly in his target demographic (I did not know until that point that the guy had been convicted of child sex offences) and finished off with something along the lines of "and look at you, you should be so lucky anyway."
When I went to tell him I was leaving the moorings and sort out my shop tab, he went literally mental-like a Jekyll and Hyde thing, and stood over me screaming and threatening me (right in front of his wife, two admin staff and with a client on the phone), and told me he would chain my boat up if I tried to leave.
I went to tell the owner of the entire compound ( who didn't care, because you know, that's how Saillet got away with his bullshit for years etc.,) and after, phoned a friend in a panic. While I was on the phone to her, he came running (literally running) across the yard screaming and threatening me again.
He has been getting away with his badness for years, and I have no doubt that he has come off very lucky to get just eight years after having finally been caught for what I can only dream are the worst offences in a long career as a professional scumbag. In the time that I knew him and his wife, she was horribly unhappy and in poor health having just begun to really see what kind of man she married. She had thrown her money into his business, and could not walk away without losing everything at 70-something. From the picture I have of it all, she was a victim too, albeit I have had no contact with her since I left.
It's all horrible and grubby and disgusting but I am very glad that now it is all out in the open. So many people thought he was awesome and defended him rigorously when some of this genie first started to break out of the bottle.