Rok creditors will not get a penny of millions due to them

BOLTON building companies owed hundreds of thousands of pounds by collapsed national builder Rok will not get a penny.

However, workers who lost their jobs when Rok went into administration in November last year have had their statutory redundancy money paid by the Government.

There was not enough cash in the failed builder’s coffers after it went bust without warning, owing creditors, including construction companies and the banks, almost £200 million.

Staff at most of the company’s offices were laid off en masse and around 220 people at the Westhoughton depot lost their jobs.

Bolton firm P and R Pointing took a £277,000 hit when Rok failed to pay for work carried out on several projects.

The company, which carried out scaffolding and pointing work around the North West, had to lay off 17 scaffolders, but was strong enough to carry on despite the massive debt and is now busy again.

Brothers Peter and Russell Gastall, who are joint managing directors of the St Helens Roadbased firm, said they have gritted their teeth and carried on winning new business.

Peter Gastall said: “We have been told that we won’t even get a penny in the pound of the £277,000 Rok owed us.

“We’ve been told that there’s no money left to pay anything to anyone.

It’s disgraceful but that’s the way it is unfortunately.

“But we are winning quite a bit of work in different places and we are still going ahead with our planned office move.”

At JDK Roofing, off Manchester Road, where the company was owed £100,000 by Rok, it is also business as usual.

Contracts manager Martin Richards said: “Things have been a bit tight but we have had to take the hit and get on with it. We got through and we are very busy right now.”

Administrators Price Waterhouse Cooper (PCW) had agreed that redundancy payments, dependent on the employees' length of service, would be paid out by the Redundancy Payments Office (RPO), part of the government Insolvency Service.

The RPO has been working to ensure that all straightforward claims were paid within six weeks.

The Bolton News understands that the majority of such payments have been made.add for p13 A spokesman for PWC said: “It is extremely unlikely that any distribution will be made to the unsecured creditors of Rok within 12 months, principally because a significant number of assets, such as contract receipts, will not be recovered within the year.”

Source: The Bolton News

Congratulations to the firms that took a hit like that and still managed to keep going, I have done it myself now 3 times all be it on a much smaller scale and know how hard it is. I would also like to say congratulations to Las Plant of Inverness who must have taken a large hit but still paid me for material delivered to a Rok site even although they already knew they would never receive a penny for it. There are still some out there who will cover their liabilities without trying to rob others even though it doesn't feel like it sometimes.

ROK down this end every one slashed prices to get the wortk so no doubt there will be a few casualties

Whos next ............

Keep monitoring them through the risk disc Scaffy.:idea:

We escaped by the skin of our teeth with ROK.
We did a fairly big project for them but managed to get all our money out of them just in time.
Had a whole bunch of companies go pop on us in recent years though.
Now we have much tighter credit control measures. Got to look at covering your costs somehow.

there is something very wrong in the way many things are done in this country, when you see the likes of KPMG and similar companies who specialise in liquidations and insolvency post massive 1 billion pound profits while many companies doing the real work lose massively sometimes everything and having to put men an women with families to look after out onto the dole queue.

legislation and the justice system plus all the other red tape in this country is enough to put anyone off trying to succeed in business or anything else for that matter in life .