OK, what is Vera missing?

The creditors don’t ‘get the assets’ to walk away with do they? The company goes into administration, the receiver sells the assets and gives whatever cash he makes to the creditors. Now I assume that some or all of the creditors could form a partnership and bid on the assets themselves when the receiver offers them for sale, but while they’d get back most of their bid from the receiver (less his costs naturally) they might as well have stuck all that money into the failing company in the first place.

I don’t understand what the problem is with TW: why isn’t the holding company put into receivership, TW itself can be auctioned off (there would be plenty of bidders for it without all the debts) and the proceeds given to the creditors. Bad luck for the universities pension fund, and the teachers pension fund in Canada, but that’ll teach them to be more careful next time.

I read somewhere the above isn’t being done because it would be ‘bad for inward investment in the UK’. What bad is that capitalism is being dragged through the mud by these sort of ‘heads we win, tales the taxpayer/bill payer loses’ versions of capitalism. Its high time some of them lost their shirts.

Hannah Barton says:
April 7 2024 at 9:06 am
It is extreme to assign those views to the vast majority of people. It’s just your usual straw man nonsense, coming from someone who is most certainly nowhere near the centre.

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Richard Murphy says:
April 7 2024 at 9:22 am
That’s quite weird because first of all there’s nothing extreme about me

I don’t understand what the problem is with TW: why isn’t the holding company put into receivership, TW itself can be auctioned off (there would be plenty of bidders for it without all the debts) and the proceeds given to the creditors.

Why do we want to auction off Tim Worstall? 😉

Creditors fall into a few general categories.

– Unpaid employees. In many cases the first to get something from any assets sold
– Unpaid taxes. Government might even step in in front of employees
– Secured creditors. They’ll probably get everything that’s left after the first two are paid
– Unsecured creditors. Often very little goes to them. If the firm is reorganized they might get shares and a
prayer that they’ll be worth something one day.

“It sounds to me more like a union. The action is being taken by individuals rather than companies (though some may own their own company). Is there any rule against everyone in a particular trade joining the same union? Such a train drivers, for example?”

They are all private business, not employees and as such are covered by the same competition laws as Tesco. Farmers (who are predominantly sole traders and unlimited partnerships) were prevented by competition law from banding together in ‘Marketing Boards’ for agricultural products such as milk and potatoes. If nail bars can act like a cartel I think we farmers better start doing the same. How does milk @ £2/litre and bread @ £5/loaf sound to you?

“It sounds to me more like a union. ” – in these business owners’ minds they’re thinking I’m not making enough money here, there should be a union for this. I’m not up on my price collusion training but i think one characteristic they might be lacking to throw the whole book at you is punishment. However since businesses can be in deep trouble for even suggesting fixing prices i still think this is dodgy as buggery and presented as a good news story makes it really odd. Maybe there’s a loophole,, under the VAT threshold perhaps?

@TD

Broadly, asset realisations in insolvency are paid out to the following classes of creditor in this order:

– secured creditors with a fixed charge (after costs of realisation)
– Insolvency practitioners’ fees and expenses
– preferential creditors
– secondary preferential creditors
– prescribed part creditors
– secured creditors with a floating charge
– non-preferential creditors
– shareholders (for insolvent companies) or individual (for personal insolvency cases)

HMRC ranks as a secondary creditor but only for VAT, PAYE, Employee’s NIC and Student Loan payments as these are (in effect) other people’s money collected by the company on behalf of HMRC.

Other debts owing to HMRC (primarily Corporation Tax and Employer’s NIC) are considered non-preferential creditor debts.

I was under the impression all nail bars were staffed by trafficked Vietnamese prostitutes. Or was that a different BBC unbiased informational article?

The photo accompanied that article showed the French military participating in the Changing of the Guard ceremony at Buckingham Palace. I suppose it’s only Jug Ears these days. Who cares?

Would the UK have entered WW1 or WW2 without the Entente Cordiale? Had it been in place earlier might we have got mixed up in the Franco-Prussian war?

Wouldn’t we all have been better off minding our own business?

Certainly WW1, Rhoda. Germany invaded Belgium to protect it’s eastern flank from the Anglo-French alliance. If it had been France alone, it’s unlikely it would have regarded it as a threat. France didn’t have the military capability to prosecute a successful war against Germany. Or to adapt another historic caution. Beware of Frenchmen bearing treaties.