Administrators appointed at Manchester Cables
AROUND 100 jobs are at risk at the B3 Cables business in Blackley following KPMG’s appointment as administrators to Manchester Cables Ltd and its sister firm FTTX.
The appointment of Colin Haig, Paul Flint and Allan Graham from KPMG Restructuring follows on from their appointment as administrators to parent company B3 Industries last week.
As yet, there have been no redundancies at either company and both are currently trading “on a limited basis” as administrators attempt to sell them as going concerns.
Joint administrator Paul Flint said: “We will be liaising closely with customers, suppliers and employees over the coming days as we explore sale options for the Manchester businesses. We would encourage anybody interested in acquiring them to contact the administrators as soon as possible.”
The last filed accounts for Manchester Cables show a pre-tax profit of £1.1m on sales of £97.4m in the year to October 31, 2010.
Another of B3 Industries’ subsidiaries, Blue Helix Limited, a supplier of networking products based in Crawley, West Sussex, was sold to a management buy-out team led by Colin Ryall last week.
Tri-Wire, based in Normanton, West Yorkshire, is not affected by the administration and continues to trade as normal.
A further subsidiary, B3 Solutions Spain SL, based in Santander, does not form part of this administration process, but has instead has entered into a voluntary pre-insolvency process under Spanish law.
B3 Industries was owned by members of its management team and former Aston Ventures partners Paul Ruocco, Douglas Barrowman and Tim Eve, although the biggest single shareholder was ex-Tri-Wire boss Michael Walton with just over 20% of the shares.
Aston Ventures arranged the initial buy-out of the Manchester Cables business, which traded as B3 Cables, in 2001 after its ex-US parent company Belden Cables announced plans to close the former BICC Cables site.
Since then, the firm has acquired several UK and overseas competitors. It also completed a £43.1m refinancing deal with US-based asset finance firm PNC Business Credit in July last year.
