Creditors claim £14m from stricken Coalville engineering firm
Administrators acting for a stricken Coalville engineering firm say they have received nearly £14m worth of claims from creditors.
Whitwick Engineering (Coalville) went into administration in May after running out of cash follwing delays on a granite quarrying project it was working on.
Whitwick Engineering (Coalville) has historically delivered bespoke materials handling and engineering projects across a range of sectors. In its last submitted accounts for the year ending 31 December 2013 the firm made a £1.15m loss. Indeed – this was when it all started to unravel for the firm.
It December 2012, Whitwick Engineering signed a contract to work on Aggregate Industries’ Glensanda granite quarry on the west coast of Scotland. Whitwick was hired to deliver the mechanical and electrical design and build of a primary crushing materials handling facility.
The contract was supposed to last 18 months and was valued at £7m. However, significant delays were experienced after a dispute between the civil contractor and Aggregate Industires which meant a substantial redesign for Whitwick.
In papers seen by TheBusinessDesk.com, at this point Whitwick was “essentially cash starved of project funding.”
To make matters worse, around the same time the company was also involved in two biomass import and distribution facilities with Graham Construction, which were at different stages of completion.
Because of the problems associated with the Aggregate Industries contract, Whitwick put a proposal together for the board of Graham Construction to restructure its payments on the biomass work. The proposal was rejected on 14 March and administrators from BDO were appointed the next day. All 28 staff were made redundant.
The administrators were unable to save or sell the company and so began selling off assets to pay secured creditors. So far, BDO says it has received claims of £13,963,565 from creditors.
Whitwick has three directors listed as Edmund Reed, Nicholas Peatling and Andrew Boam. The firm was co-operated on 1 December 1994.
