Documents evidencing the extent of the financial mismanagement which led to the liquidation of eight companies under the directorship of Mr Stainer (pictured left) and trading exclusively within the Grand – Folkestone, Kent, are now available at Companies House for the public to peruse at their leisure. They make for interesting reading:
These documents are the “Liquidators’ statement of receipts and payments” for The Grand Folkestone Partnership Limited, and the “Progress report in a winding up by the court” for The Grand Folkestone Limited. There are similar for each of the other companies. These are formal legal reports issued by the Insolvency Practitioners, MacIntyre Hudson, in accordance with Rule 18.7 of the Insolvency Rules 2016.
This is an extract from the Grand Folkestone Partnership Ltd:
* – This means that HMRC’s for £281,016.43 claim against the company has been received. The figure of £2,850.000.00 is a typographical error and should be £285,000 as admitted in Stainer’s statement of affairs below.
The next “revelation” is that the combined assets of this company, and all the others, are zero. Therefore, not a penny has been or will be available for creditors. The following shows money in and money out.
The most interest document, however, is the Notice of Statement of Affairs filed and completed on Sept 12th, 2018 and signed by Michael Stainer as true:
According to Mr Stainer, the assets of this company were as follows:
What Stainer admitted as being owed was as follows:
Bear in mind these are figures submitted in a sworn statement by Mr Stainer, not some anonymous third-party source. So, £76,000 is owed to “trade and expense creditors”, and £285.000 to HMRC. Note that on the other returns, the HMRC debt as supplied by HMRC to the Insolvency Practitioners is significantly higher — by a factor of at least three! The £76,000 includes £10,000 to Folkestone and Hythe District Council.
So the question we would like an answer to is simple: these companies claimed to be trading successfully. To quote Robert Richardson (pictured) who was their general manager throughout and before this period, he had in his own words “ownership of the businesses P&L (profit and loss)account and implementation of strategies for financial management”. So what went wrong and where did the money go that flowed from the 18-holiday lets?
Luckily, all is not lost. This entire debt is now the personal liability of the Stainers as documented in our previous article.
