Scott Murray and Tom Keenan of advisory firm Keenan CF have been appointed as joint administrators of Nicholson & Bass by Upstream Capital, which held a qualifying floating charge over the business.
Separately, a creditors’ meeting regarding Quinns Belfast (2009) held last week was adjourned due to a technicality and reorganised for the beginning of this week (21 October) instead. The liquidation of Quinns Belfast (2009) is being handled by James Kennedy of JBK Accountants.
Information related to the insolvency of Quinns Belfast (2009) distributed at the creditors’ meeting and seen by Printweek shows that Quinns had unsecured creditors of just over £3m with the Bradley Group owed £900k and employees owed £250k according to the documents.
The business was sold for £1 to John McGrath, with the report stating that cumulative issues including Brexit, rising paper prices and the closure of its Liverpool factory had resulted in substantial losses.
“As the company was attempting to restructure it suffered a major defalcation on the part of a senior employee giving rise to significant additional losses. The result of these cumulative adverse events resulting in the company becoming quite insolvent,” the report said.
Quinns was sold to “Irish interests who were interested in taking on the tax losses of the company”.
The equivalent report related to Nicholson & Bass is yet to be circulated.
Printweek has also learned that a number of former employees of Nicholson & Bass have received letters this month from workplace pension provider The People’s Pension informing them that their pension contributions “for the month of May 2019” have not been received and Nicholson & Bass has been reported to The Pensions Regulator as a result.
In a statement Bradley Group managing director Peter Bradley said that pensions were paid quarterly, and the last payment was “not on their watch”, despite the May date.
“The Quinns pension is up-to-date, the Nicholson Bass pension is being brought up-to-date by the Bradley Group as a goodwill gesture,” he said.
Bradley also said the Bradley Group was yet to receive the relevant figures from the The People’s Pension and the intention was to resolve the matter once that information was supplied.
The Pensions Regulator has a wide range of powers in the case of companies that do not meet their duties with regards to pension legislation, including an escalating penalty notice involving fines from £50 to £10,000 a day depending on the number of staff involved.
At the time of writing there was no further information on whether the former Bradley Group employee released under investigation by the Police Service of Northern Ireland regarding an alleged £500,000 fraud had been charged with any offences.
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