Administrators hammer final nail into Evesham's coffin

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 11 Feb 2009 at 10:20

Evesham Technology has finally been dissolved following a long-running administration saga.

The company was finally granted dissolution status on 30 January 2009, while the Evesham.com website has seemingly been taken offline.

Evesham was subject to an £11m "rescue-bid" from PCC Technology - a Dubai firm run by the former founder of Time Computers, Tahir Mohsan - in August 2007.

Mohsan put the company up for sale last February, a move that was always destined to fail given that the company's plant and equipment had already been sold to Mohsan's firm.

The dissolution report filed by administrators Leonard Curtis claims "PCC Technology Limited has been paid £4,106,000 resulting from the sale of the land and buildings". However, it's not quite the jackpot it first appears, with previous administrator reports revealing that PCC had paid Lloyds TSB £4.5 million "in full satisfaction of the outstanding indebtedness".

The big losers from the collapse include HM Revenue and Customs and Evesham's former suppliers, who joined a long list of unsecured creditors who received precisely nothing following the company's collapse.

"The only claims which remain preferential are those of employees in respect of wages (up to £800 per employee) and holiday pay," the administrators report reads. A sum of £62,686 was paid to the Redundancy Payments Office to deal with these claims.

Former Evesham managing director, Richard Austin, also gets to keep his sports car, after the administrators decided it wasn't worth pursuing a sale. "After an initial review of the asset was completed, an offer was received that was pursued by the administrators," the report states.

"Unfortunately, a sale was not completed and our agents advised that the costs involved [sic] uplifting the vehicle outweighed any likely realisations form a forced sale scenario. Subsequently the asset has been abandoned."

In fact, the only winners from the whole sorry scenario are the administrators, whose remuneration totted up to a figure in excess of £300,000 at a rate of more than £200 per hour. Nice work if you can get it.