Best Connection Group Ltd., an employment agency that supplied workers for Sports Direct’s warehouse in Shirebrook, Derbyshire, lost its appeal against fines for paying less than the minimum wage, according to the UK Ministry of Justice.

Best Connection was fined £263,000 in 2016 and ordered to pay £470,000 to the underpaid workers. The agency supplied the warehouse with an average of 1,500 to 2,000 workers each week for a number of years.

Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs in January 2016 began an investigation into the pay of Shirebrook workers and found that if a worker at Shirebrook clocked in even a minute late for his shift, the time recording system would automatically default to the next 15 minutes, with the result that the worker would not be paid for part of that quarter-hour at work. Additionally, after clocking off, workers had to undergo security searches for which there were long queues.

As a result, when weekly pay was divided by working time, they were being paid less than the national minimum wage.

Best Connection had claimed it was the victim of a “deliberate ploy” by HMRC to extract more money from it and claimed the penalty was designed to be “punitive” and a “deterrent”, BBC News reported. It also said HMRC’s notices were invalid because they did not name individual workers or the amount by which they had been underpaid. However, Judge Sarah Goodman rejected all of the complaints and confirmed the penalty.

Transline, another employment agency that was involved with Sports Direct, was sold to London-based Russell Taylor Group earlier this year after filing for insolvency.