Right, as the car turned up just down the road from me, I decided to get it checked out by Trading Standards.
The car is currently for sale with S.J. Cars in Shotton, however it is not owned by them. Apparently they were contacted by a dealer called J.S. Cars (a name coincidence... :? ) based in Manchester and asked to sell it on their behalf...
A person at S.J. Cars commented that he thought this arrangement was 'odd' to the investigations officer that contacted him about the car, but that he had had dealing with them in the past. He then commented that the vehicle will be sent back to the Manchester dealer.
The investigations officer said that without a full engineers report the vehicle cannot be declared as unroadworthy and that it has a current MOT.
So to cut a long story short as long as the vehicle is not mis-described (and this can be achieved by keeping the advert suitably vague) or declared unroadworthy, it is still legitimate to sell. the law is 'grey' in this area and the investigations officer could only apologise...
It will probably disappear for a while only to resurface at some point. I guess we can only hope that either the car is advertised as damaged repaired and sold as such or that the future owner is savy enough to realise what he is getting into...
All we can do is keep people informed I guess...
Rgds