Crain's Manchester Business - 11-15 January, 2010 - (Page 1)

CRAIN’S LIST Recruitment Companies Page 14 FOCUS Page 11 Workforce Pay rises, who needs them? CRAIN’S MANCHESTER BUSINESS VOL. 3, ISSUE 2, JANUARY 11 - 15, 2010 CrainsManchesterBusiness.co.uk £2 What’s News ■ A string of blue chip investment funds have joined the shareholder register at chains and gears manufacturer Renold Plc since the Wythenshawe-based company raised £27m with a fundraising in December. The new investors are BlackRock, Cazenove, Invesco, JO Hambro Capital, Majedie and Tosca Fund and all have stakes of between 2 and 4 per cent. A Renold spokesman said the interest showed that institutions saw the stock as a recovery play. Renold posted an £8.8m pre-tax loss in the six months to September 30 but claims to be gaining market share from rivals. ■ Dukinfield-based Bardsley Construction Ltd has won a £5.2m contract to build a Centre of Excellence in Education Innovation and Enterprise at Liverpool Hope University. The works include minor demolition, site clearance and the construction of approximately 26,000 sq ft of new floor space at the university campus in south Liverpool. Bardsley was one of five bidders. ■ The Manchester Central convention complex is to be refinanced in the next 12 months. Newly-filed accounts show that two loans, one of £7m which matures in June and one of £10m, due in 2014, are due to be repaid. The accounts say they will be replaced with a new funding structure “with an appropriate element of long term debt and increase in share capital.” Manchester City Council and Trafford Metropolitan Borough Council each own 50 per cent of the complex. Notes to the accounts reveal that after the year end on March 31, 2009, Manchester Central Convention Complex Ltd entered into a new £10m loan agreement to fund the remainder of the first two phases, although it does not reveal who the lender is. The complex saw revenues fall 9 per cent to £7.9m in the year, while pre-tax profits rose to £1.5m from £1.3m. ■ Investment fund Threadneedle has bought the Body Shop store at 24-26 King Street in Manchester for £2.3m. Martin Hamer, of NB Real Estate, which acted for the buyer, said the unit produces an annual rent of £188,060 and the deal reflects a net initial yield of 7.75 per cent. It originally went on the market last April with an asking price of £2.75m. Hamer said the deal showed that “fundamentally good real estate can still be bought at very attractive prices”. ■ Manchester-based Zeus Private Equity has backed portfolio company Hallmark Hotels on its acquisition of the Hotel Elizabeth in Hull. The 95-bed hotel is Hallmark’s sixth and was bought from administrators following the failure of its former parent Elizabeth Law firm shut in dishonesty investigation SRA intervenes after Hardman Partnership suspected of breaching accounting rules BY CRAIN’S STAFF REPORTER The Hardman Partnership is the latest victim of the shake-out sweeping through Manchester’s law firms It was closed down by the Solicitors’ Regulation Authority just before Christmas, but some staff only found out when they came in to work last Monday. The SRA confirmed that the single office firm, based on the 7th Floor of Blackfriars House in Parsonage, was closed on December 21. An SRA spokesman said the firm had been closed down for suspected dishonesty and breaches of solicitors’ accounting rules. All of its files have been handed over to DWF. The firm’s top floor office was locked and the lights were off when Crain’s visited last Thursday afternoon. A member of staff from the offices opposite told our reporter: “It’s gone bump. The staff came in on Monday, the first day back after Christmas, and got told about it. Not a very good start to the year.” When the SRA intervened, the firm was headed by sole practitionerprincipal John Gregory Hardman, who founded it in 1993. By 2007 it had grown to two partners and eight assistants doing corporate and commercial work, including employment and personal injury litigation, and had a turnover of just over £1m. Clients have included Blackley manufacturing company B3 Cable Solutions and Egmont Books. Launched The firm tried to compete with employment law advisory firms like Peninsula Business Services and ELAS by offering an employment solutions legal costs insurance package aimed at smaller businesses. When the package was launched, managing partner Hardman said that by being more pro-active and working to prevent problems for clients, solicitors would stem the loss of market share to non-law firms. Crain’s understands that the firm Joan Fielding has done a brisk trade in wellington boots SEE LAW, PAGE 18 £3m of baker’s dough lost in Icelandic bank BY MICHAEL FAHY Greenhalgh’s Craft Bakery, the family-owned chain of bakery stores based in Bolton, has written off more than £3m following the collapse of Icelandic bank Kaupthing Singer & Friedlander. The losses are revealed in the most recently-filed set of accounts for the year to January 31, 2009. The business had more than £6.5m on term deposits with the bank, but has written off half of that sum because it does not expect to get the money back from administrators. As a result of the write-down, Greenhalgh’s declared a pre-tax loss of £3.2m, compared with a profit of more than £400,000 a year earlier. This is despite the fact that the company, which employs more than 950 at its two bakeries and 56 retail outlets, achieved a 9 per cent increase in sales to £25m (2008: £22.9m). However, notes to the accounts written by directors say the company has enough resources to cover the shortfall. “The company closed the year with net current assets of £4.2m and shareholders’ funds of £16.4m, which the directors consider to be satisfactory,” it said. Greenhalgh’s, which was bought by Allan Smart in 1957 and is still owned by his family, did not return calls for comment. It was not the only business to be caught out when Kaupthing, Singer & Friedlander was placed into administration in October 2008 following a collapse of the banking sector in Iceland. GIVING IT SOME WELLY BY JAMES CHAPELARD SEE WHAT’S NEWS, PAGE 2 ursing the snow and ice? Some businesses aren’t — the colder it gets, the more they rub their hands with glee. Joan Fielding, sales manager at United Footwear on Oldham Street, has been deluged by hundreds of customers looking for wellington boots. Fielding ran out early last week but luckily an order came in to replenish depleted stocks. She has mostly been selling plain black gumboots rather than the more colourful fashion models. She told Crain’s: “We have had phone calls from people asking if we have any. People have been coming from all over. Apparently nobody else in central Manchester has any left. Since we opened last Wednesday all we have done is sell wellies. We are about 60 per cent up on a normal week. “Thankfully, we had placed an order before all the snow hit otherwise we would have been out. If we have more snow it will be even busier. We have had a couple of hundred people in buying them. It’s been mayhem. I don’t want to see more snow, but it has been good for business.” While the Federation of Small Business estimated that the weather could be costing Greater Manchester’s economy £24m a day because of SEE ICE, PAGE 18 SEE BAKER, PAGE 18 Leading Page 3 ONLY GRANTS WILL FILL ROCHDALE’S EMPTY SHOPS, SAY RETAILERS http://CrainsManchesterBusiness.co.uk

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Crain's Manchester Business - 11-15 January, 2010

Crain's Manchester Business - 11-15 January, 2010

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