In Brief: Neill & Brown; Yorkshire Business Claim; Blacks; Belgravium; Duff & Phelps
LOGISTICS company Neill & Brown Global Logistics has won new business following the single most expensive investment in its fleet.
Its £180,000 crane mounted truck is capable of lifting units of up to nine tonnes, and has a 14-metre crane reach. The vehicle is being used locally and nationally, including on several railway sites around the country and on housing and commercial construction sites for the transport of site cabins and modular buildings.
As the latest addition to the company’s growing fleet of 40 vehicles it is part of Neill & Brown’s commitment to acquire 35 new trucks over the next five years.
Neill & Brown’s CEO Peter Brown said: “This is a considerable investment and is indicative of the upturn in the construction sector both regionally and nationally and also of our optimism in general economic growth.”
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BANK mis-selling claims business All Square has launched a new venture called Yorkshire Business Claim to help customers of Yorkshire Bank who were miss-sold products.
Based in Leeds, Yorkshire Business Claim will focus on securing redress for mis-sold ‘hedging’ products including Tailored Business Loans (TBLs) and freestanding interest rate hedging products, such as swaps, caps and collars.
Daniel Hall, managing director at Yorkshire Business Claim, said: “Between 2001 and 2012, Yorkshire Bank sold over 11,000 Tailored Business Loans to a variety of businesses who could ill-afford them. It was often the case that businesses didn’t have a proper understanding of what they were getting into or the costs of getting out of them.”
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BLACKS Solicitors has acted on behalf of Cheshire-based IT service provider Comms-care on a multi-million pound support contract deal in partnership with information and communications services provider, Kcom.
Leeds-based Blacks advised on a three-year agreement that will see Comms-care manage the delivery of Hull-headquartered Kcom’s Cisco support services for field-based support and spares management across 6,000 end-user sites covering 100,000 Cisco products.
Dave Paterson, partner in corporate and commercial at Blacks said: “There were various complex commercial and intellectual property issues faced in this deal, however our team at Blacks Solicitors were able to demonstrate our capability to deal with such issues, and achieved a result which enabled our client to seamlessly take over the provision of these outsourced IT services for Kcom.”
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BELGRAVIUM Technologies, the Bradford-based software business, has announced that trading in the first six months of the year has been satisfactory and in line with management’s expectations.
Despite trading in the period starting slowly, it picked up significantly in Q2 and as a consequence the results for the six months ended June 30 2014 will show an increase in revenue and a significant improvement in profits compared to the equivalent period last year, the group said.
Belgravium said: “As in previous years trading for the year as a whole is expected to be second half weighted. The directors are encouraged by the level of enquiries and are confident that a good proportion of these can be converted to sales in the second half.”
The results for the six months ended June 30 2014 are expected to be announced in September.
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KEITH Marshall and Benjamin Wiles of the Leeds office of Duff & Phelps have been appointed joint administrators of Tyneside Autobuy.
In response to declining trading performance, Duff & Phelps, in conjunction with management, had attempted to seek a purchaser for the North East business during the preceding two weeks. Ultimately, no suitable purchaser came forward and management took the decision to cease trading and make the 49 employees redundant.
Marshall said: “Regrettably, despite the best efforts of management and its funders, who supported the process, it was not possible to achieve a sale of the business as a going concern. The lack of interest was primarily due to challenging conditions in the used-car sector and the business’ historically weak trading performance. Our focus now is on dealing with ongoing customer queries in as sympathetic a manner as possible and expediting employee claims to ensure that redundancy payments are processed as quickly as possible.”
Tyneside Autobuy ran the North East’s largest second hand car supermarket and had traded since 2010 achieving an annual turnover in excess of £25m.
