Moody’s withdraws GoAhead’s rating following results delay

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Go-Ahead Group, the UK's largest rail operator, could be up for sale as part of a wider sell-off being explored by the Canadian pension fund OPTrust.
The news comes just over a year and a half after the UK-listed transport giant was taken private in a £650m deal backed by a number of international pension funds, including OPTrust.

Moody’s has withdrawn Go Ahead Group’s rating following the firm’s announcement last week that its audited results would be delayed until the end of February.

The credit rating company has also removed Go Ahead’s Ba1 corporate family rating and its Ba1-PD probability of default rating, after initially reviewing them for a downgrade. Moody’s cited the presence of insufficient and inadequate information as the main reason behind the decision.

Go Ahead – the UK’s biggest train operator as it runs through its subsidiary one in four services – made the headlines on Monday when it delayed filing its financial results for the second time in a row.

The company’s shares were initially suspended when it said it couldn’t file results by 3 January deadline, as the group admitted serious fault and failures in the way it ran operations at Southeastern Railway, City PM reported.