Luxury boat builder Fairline goes into administration, just two months after being sold by Better Capital
Luxury boat builder Fairline has well and truly entered choppy waters, as the company has gone into administration.
Restructuring firm FRP Advisory revealed today that Geoff Rowley and Alastair Massey of the firm had been appointed joint administrators.
The administration announcement comes just two months after the shareholding in Fairline was sold by Better Capital to private equity firm Wessex Bristol.
Fairline, which has factories in Oundle and Corby and a testing site in Ipswich, employed roughly 450 staff before going into administration. The majority of the workers were located at the two factories.
In its statement announcing the administration, FRP Advisory said: “It is anticipated that there will be redundancies in the near term although the joint administrators will retain a core team of workers to help trade the business, service existing orders and liaise with customers, suppliers and boat dealers.”
The administrators have told staff this evening that they will update the workforce on next Tuesday morning about their position and any detail on the business going forward.
Yesterday, Unite alleged that the company had not paid its pension contributions for three months, even though money for the contributions had been taken from staff wages, and added that the company had made 185 workers redundant recently.
At the time the trade union made its statement, Mick Orpin, Unite regional officer, said: “We need to emphasise that there is no support coming from the company for those displaced workers – basically, the management is behaving like Pontius Pilate and washing its hands of a long-standing dedicated workforce.”
FRP Advisory declined to comment on Unite's claims about the pension payments.