Crain's Manchester Business - 26-30 April, 2010 - (Page 1)

CRAIN’S LIST Housing Associations & Trusts Page 14 STARTS ON PAGE 11 Commercial Property Blue sky thinking vital for recovery CRAIN’S MANCHESTER BUSINESS VOL. 3, ISSUE 17, APRIL 26 - 30, 2010 CrainsManchesterBusiness.co.uk £2 What’s News ■ A company owned by Cartel Client Review chief executive Carl Wright is facing a winding-up petition from Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs. Marketing firm Creative Decisions Ltd, whose registered office is in the same building as Cartel Client Review, is facing a winding-up petition at the Royal Courts of Justice in London on April 28. Creative Decisions’ last filed accounts for the year to September 2008 showed that the firm had net assets of £17,881. However, accounts for Cartel Group Holdings showed that it was owed £67,733 by Creative Decisions on the same date. Wright was unavailable for comment. ■ Manchester-based child care chain Kids Allowed is to open a fourth site in Macclesfield. The group is looking to open the centre, located on part of the old Hospital site on Victoria Road, by January 2011. It currently has sites in Knutsford, Cheadle Royal and Didsbury. The building will have comfort cooling, outdoor play, roof garden, sensory theatre and a parent concierge service to look after daily chores such as dry cleaning, ironing, post and babysitting. ■ Tesco is planning to open a sixth store in Manchester city centre store in a unit at Bruntwood’s Piccadilly Plaza complex on Piccadilly Gardens. The unit will be housed in the former clothes store Internaçionale. Tesco Stores Ltd has applied to Manchester City Council for an alcohol licence at the unit, where it intends to sell alcohol between Monday and Sunday from 6am to 11 pm. ■ Manchester-based mxData is to launch a new mobile phone application containing a detailed map of the New York Subway network. The release follows a similar application containing the London tube map last year. The application provides access to the network of subway lines across New York and is available for free download on various platforms including Apple, Blackberry, Ovi (Nokia) and Android. ■ Manchester-based NJL Consulting has won planning permission for work to be carried out on 30,000 sq ft of vacant units at the Peel Centre retail park in Stockport in a bid to bring new retailers into the town. A spokesman for Peel, which owns the park, said: “Such consents are essential if the Peel Centre is to continue to provide Stockport Town Centre with a credible and attractive alternative to retail parks further afield. The flexibility to create a range of unit sizes and install mezzanine floors is essential to being able to respond to the dynamic and ever- Struck-off solicitor plans £13m college Digital TV station wins licence to teach 1,500 international students at media site in Manchester BY SAMRANA HUSSAIN The owner of an Asian digital TV station has been granted a licence to teach up to 1,500 international students at a new media college in Manchester. Manchester College of Higher Education and Media Technology (MCHEMT), which in April was licensed by the Home Office to teach non-UK and non-EU students, is run by the owner and station director of Manchester-based , Dr Liaqat Malik. The college currently teaches 200 students at its offices on Cheetham Hill Road and at Turner Street in Manchester’s Northern Quarter, but Malik said he is planning a new purpose-built campus with a capacity to hold up to 3,000 students when it opens in September. He envisages that half of these students will be UKbased, but the rest will be foreign nationals. Malik said that he has used £13m of his own money to fund the new campus on Lord Street, which is behind the TV station. The college boasts of a “comfortable ‘high-tech’ learning environment” on its website along with “modern computer facilities”, which it currently shares with DM Digital on Cheetham Hill Road. “It will be an up-to-date modern facility,” said Malik. “Students will learn to develop software. Now we have to buy it from abroad places like America, Singapore and Pakistan. But I want to train people here to develop their own software. The courses are more vocational and practical and are not just limited to media. There’s IT training and a course for property lawyers. “It is a business proposition but it’s more of a service for the community to engage young people.” Malik will be seen by some as a controversial figure to be running a college. He is a former lawyer who was struck off by a Solicitors’ Disciplinary Tribunal in July 2004 after it Louise Duerr SEE COLLEGE, PAGE 18 Court rules in favour of Guy in bankruptcy row BY ANDREW ROSTHORN The man who claims he owns the land around the future home of breakaway Manchester soccer club FC United has overturned a bid to bankrupt him. Trevor Guy, 46, who was once described as “the richest man in Yorkshire”, before becoming entangled in the collapse of the Manchester-based bridging loan firm Lexi Holdings Plc, has had an earlier decision to bankrupt him annulled. His creditors had voted narrowly to allow his administrators, Moore Stephens, to re-open a long-running legal battle with Barclays Bank to recover 48 acres of land at Ten Acres Lane in Newton Heath. The land is close to the birthplace of Manchester United and borders an area owned by Manchester City Council, where Unibond Premier league side FC United of Manchester is now planning to build a £3.5m, 5,000-seater stadium. “Getting blighted land moving is what I do”, said Guy. He said he first began buying land in the area in 1998. “I knew that Redrow Homes had their eyes on a full scheme to build 400 houses. There were big problems at Ten Acre Lane, with any number of landowners to deal with. But that’s what we do.” He said there were a number of landowners with whom he had agreed deals, but there was a “ransom strip” being held by a landowner who was refusing to sell. Eventually, he agreed a deal in 2003 and borrowed money from Lexi Holdings to secure the site. Lexi was run by Shaid Luqman, who has sub- BIG DEAL FOR TINY TUMS BY JAMES CHAPELARD PHOTO: MARTIN O’NEILL/STUDIOFIVEFOUR.COM O SEE WHAT’S NEWS, PAGE 2 rganic baby food maker Baby Deli has doubled the size of its Irlam factory after winning two new contracts to supply restaurant chain Frankie & Benny’s and all of supermarket giant Asda’s in-store cafés. Baby Deli, headed by owner Louise Duerr, said the new contracts combined would equate to an extra £500,000 a year in business and more than double its current turnover to £850,000. Baby Deli already supplies John Lewis cafés and Ocado, but Duerr hopes the Frankie & Benny’s deal will translate into other contracts with family-friendly restaurant chains. “The future is foodservice because no one else is doing what I am doing,” she said. “The potential is massive when you think of all the restaurants and cafés out there.” She said the firm is exploiting a gap in the market, because few restaurants and cafés serve food of a decent enough standard for babies and toddlers. “If you are a mum with a baby you either get presented with a jar of crap or nothing,” she said. “Babies are not very well catered for.” The baby food will be sold in pots for around £1.50 each. Duerr said SEE GUY, PAGE 18 SEE BABY, PAGE 18 Leading Page 3 DUO BEHIND GAMER BAR AIM TO CASH IN ON CONSOLE CRAZE http://CrainsManchesterBusiness.co.uk

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Crain's Manchester Business - 26-30 April, 2010

Crain's Manchester Business - 26-30 April, 2010