Following the demise of Rok and Connaught, a third national building maintenance company, Kinetics Group, has gone into administration with 500 employees being made redundant leaving a skeleton staff of 50 to deal with its five sites.
Insolvency practitioners Begbies Traynor were appointed as administrators in July and attribute the demise to the loss of key contracts and delays in payments by customers.
The background to this dramatic failure seems to be rather complicated. In June 2011, there appears to have been an attempt to save the company through acquisition of the business and assets of a number of its own subsidiaries by a newly formed subsidiary SCP Renewable Energy Limited (SCP).
It is not yet clear if the acquisition took place before or after these companies were placed in liquidation or administration and a further complication is SCP Renewable Energy Limited’s status, referred to by the administrators as a newly incorporated company owned by Kinetics. But this name is not listed at Companies House.
In my view it is clear that the June restructuring was flawed. What exacly was the role of the various stakeholders? Did they ensure that viable restructuring and business plans were in place as a condition of their approving the acquisition?
Is this an issue with the sale of business and assets by an administrator, where the administrator is not responsible for the ability of any purchaser to run or fund the acquired business?
Administrators rarely save a company as a going concern, so their only real objective is to maximise realisations for the benefit of creditors.
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