Hewden, the heavy machinery firm, is on the verge of collapse after failing to find a new backer.
The company’s owner, Sun Capital Partners, has called in EY to act as the company’s administrators. More than 1,000 jobs at 32 depots across the country are at risk.
Hewden’s pension scheme is also expected to enter the Pension Protection Fund, a government-backed lifeboat scheme which currently pays more than 200,000 savers’ final salary pensions after their employer has gone bust, reported The Telegraph.
The firm faces a race against time to refinance £190m of borrowings, which expire in the coming months. It had been working with restructuring experts at Deloitte, who were hoping to refinance the business or sell it. But talks with potential new investors, including Alchemy Partners, have not been successful, according to the report.
Hewden’s most recent accounts, covering the 12-month period to December 31 2014, show that the company made a pretax loss of £16.6m on sales of £105.9m. It notched up exceptional costs of £2.2m, attributed to “severance, depot closure costs and other restructuring”, and forked out £8.9m in interest payments during the year.
The company is one of the UK’s biggest heavy machinery rental firms.
It said last month that it had been affected by declining trading conditions in the industry and had been “impacted by market uncertainty following the vote to leave the EU”.
The Manchester-based company rents out machinery such as cranes and excavators. It said that “the vote [to leave the European Union] has adversely affected a number of large construction and capital investment projects”.
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