The administration doesnt affect Perivan London, which was spun off by the group earlier this year and is separately funded and trading profitably.
The real culprit of this is the pension scheme, which has derailed a fundraising effort which was part of a restructuring of the business, said Hood.
He said the company had been paying in 410,000 a year to keep the pension scheme afloat, and had closed it to new entrants three years ago.
They took pre-emptive measure early, but the scale of the problem is a fraction of what it was two years ago, he said.
Last month Perivan White Dove announced bullish growth plans, saying it would buy a 10-colour Heidelberg Speedmaster 102-10P perfector and Prinance MIS, having previously been a MAN Roland house. It also became the first high-quality colour printer to adopt Creos 10micron Staccato screening.
Although he could not be certain, Hood expected that the decision to purchase the equipment pre-dated the full scale of the pension deficit problem.
This is a clear-cut case of a pension fund deficit torpedoing a fairly good business, he added.
The business remained busy, he said. He confirmed that Begbies Traynor was in substantive discussions with two major players, neither of which have links to the company, and was cautiously optimistic that a sale of the business could be concluded quickly.
Perivan White Dove has sales of around 9m and is the sole trading division of Perivan Group. Perivan Group, which posted sales of 17.7m in 2002, spun off its London operations earlier this year.
Perivan bought Southend-on-Sea company White Dove Press in 2001, closing its factory a year later to merge it into its own operations.
It appointed Mark Croucher, formerly the managing director at rival St Ives Westerham Press, as its new managing director in October 2002 and a number of Crouchers former St Ives colleagues followed him to Southend-on-Sea. The firm planned to establish itself as one of the elite colour printers in the UK.
The news surprised rivals and clients. One corporate print buyer said: This is a real shock. I feel very sad for the people there.
