The Government has made £15million in the past five years by selling the names and addresses of more than six million motorists to wheel clampers and car park operators.
Nearly 70 private firms, including bailiffs, debt collectors, solicitors and finance companies, are allowed access to the database of the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, which holds personal information about Britain's 38million drivers.
Armed with this data, enforcement companies then demand huge sums of money from motorists whom they accuse of parking on privately owned land or staying too long in supermarket, hospital and railway car parks.
One recipient of this sensitive information is a controversial clamping company, Creative Car Park Management, whose sole director is a debt-ridden Lithuanian businessman.
Rolandas Silanskas, 36, divides his time between his family home in the Baltic state and a shabby two-bedroom house on a council estate in Edgware, North London.
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Last October, he was made the subject of an IVA (Individual Voluntary Arrangement) by the High Court – a device used by people on the verge of bankruptcy to help them manage their debts.
The Government's Insolvency Service confirmed last night that the order against him was still in force.
Creative Car Park Management uses a complex web of companies – making it difficult to see how much money is earned from its clamping operation.
It has the dubious distinction of having allegedly charged the highest fee on record – £750 – to release a car that had been immobilised and then taken away on a pick-up truck, according to the RAC Foundation.
It installs cameras at the entrances and exits to its sites to record the numberplates of drivers who, the company alleges, stay beyond the "free parking" limit.
Its clients include several large property companies, hospitals and the Co-op and Aldi supermarket chains.
Between April 2007 and March 2008, CCPM purchased the personal details of 21,326 motorists by providing the DVLA with car registration numbers.
The agency was unable to say how many names CCPM had obtained in previous years.
Although Companies House documents show the sole director of CCPM as Mr Silanskas, the firm is actually controlled by Gary Wayne, 38, who hides his links to CCPM but is a director of a string of associated companies registered to the same address.
He declined to comment on Mr Silanskas's role. But Mr Silanskas said at his home in Edgware: "Gary wanted me to be a director and he told me it was better to put my home in Lithuania on the Companies House forms because that would make it more difficult for people to find out about me.
"I used to do all the clamping and going round talking to clients. Gary runs the office. But things didn't work out. I'm working for a Russian company now."
Companies such as CCPM charge their clients nothing, deriving their income from the large fines they levy on drivers.
Other operators on the DVLA's "approved" list include National Clamps, which admits to immobilising 10,000 vehicles a year, London parking enforcer VCS, which won the RAC's "Dick Turpin" award in 2005 for the "legalised mugging" of drivers, and Excel Parking Services, whose claim against a motorist over a £300 unpaid fine was thrown out of court in March after the judge said Excel's high charges were intended to "frighten or intimidate" – so were unlawful.
In 2005, The Mail on Sunday revealed that the DVLA was selling names and addresses to a Portsmouth wheel-clamping firm run by two convicted criminals.
Darren Havell and Gordon Miller were jailed for deliberately trapping drivers by blocking them with a van, and even immobilising cars as they were being driven away.
Our revelations forced the Government to order a review of the DVLA's practice of selling personal information to companies.
Ministers claim the rules have been tightened but campaigners have urged Information Commissioner Richard Thomas to intervene. Since 2003, only 2 per cent of requests from private firms to the DVLA for information have been turned down.
Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker, who obtained the figures from the Department for Transport, said last night: "It's quite clear that the Government has failed to live up to its promise to stop the inappropriate release of information."
A DVLA spokesman said: "Unauthorised parking on private land is a widespread problem and without the information, landowners could argue that the DVLA was denying them the ability to seek redress.
"However, it is vitally important to protect people's identity and that is why we introduced a whole package of measures to ensure information is released only when appropriate and is not misused."
