Canbury Construction Limited (10313866): administration
- Status
- Administration ended
- Administration began
- 2022-11-03
- Administrators
- James Alexander Snowdon, Georgina Marie Eason
- Administrators' firm
- MHA
- Incorporated
- 2016-08-05
- Location
- London
- Industry
- 41201 Construction of commercial buildings
Why it went into administration
- HMRC / tax arrears
From the administrators' statement
In early October, in anticipation of the preparation of Quarter 3 management accounts, the Directors tasked the expanded commercial team, to assess and update forecast costs to complete on live projects completing in quarter 4, including supplier and subcontractor accounts and to focus on the recovery of variations, where progress had slowed.
Due to issues and shortages in the availability of skilled labour, critical path supply items and statutory authorities with extended lead times this caused disruption, delay and out of sequence working. Asa consequence, the various project timelines were altered, and the Company had three major projects completing over the same three-month period. This peak expenditure and the continued price increases resulted in costs exceeding previous forecasts, credit limits being stretched and cashflow being squeezed. The Directors explored various avenues to bring additional funds into the business, but the Company’s bankers had no appetite for loan or overdraft finance within the construction market and retention releases would take more time to be realised than originally anticipated. The Company did, however, manage to arrange two cash injections (£200,000 on 21 October 2022 and £200,000 on 21 October 2022 provided by an associated company LESDTA Ltd) and also a Time-to-Pay arrangement with HM Revenue & Customs (“HMRC”) which with fair valuations, would ensure month end payments could be made and allow more time to agree the variations.
The Employer's agent’s assessment of the Epsom valuation for works completed up to mid-October was then received which had been reduced from £1.2 million to c.£110,000 with variations and previous on-account payments being reviewed and, in some cases, reduced what had been expected to be an increase. This was a real shock to the Company and though Company’s teams of quantity surveyors were able to negotiate a small increase in the valuation to c.£415,000, this was not sufficient to meet the payments required on the project.
Administrators' statement of proposals (2022-12-18) · Companies House register