Company Liquidated, but still running....

tomED

Hi there,

I recently got stung by a company that we did some work for. Stung to the tune of thousands.......

For weeks I had been chasing them for payment and was told that they were in the middle of buy-out talks and that the cheque would be in the post the following monday... etc.. etc..

When I expected my cheque to arrive, I instead got a proxy form for the liquidated company. They no longer took my calls and I was left in the dark.

A couple of weeks later, I got a phone call from a guy who's company just bought the assets of the liquidated company, looking to do a deal with me for the work we had done.

Anyway, to cut a long story short.... it turns out ALL staff and management that we worked with are still working from the same premises, under the same name, but are now owned by this new company. My guess is that they only liquidated the company to make it easier for them to buy, in that they could remove all outstanding debts.

Do I have any grounds for trying to get some money?? OR is there anything I can do??

Thomas_S_Hunterson

I think the best thing to do would be get proper legal advice. The law gets quite complex when it comes to situations like this.

DublinDilbert

They can not trade under the same name if they were officially liquidated, i know this for a fact! The name can not be used for a long period of time ( 10 years i think ) to stop this very thing happening...

I would check if the company have been officially liquidated, I'm sure the CRO would have a record of this... Then i would look up the registration details of the "new" company with the CRO...

Does the new guy expect you to do work for him, although you were not paid by the last company??? Personally if you have other customers, i'd tell him to feck off unless he pays what they owe you.. I wouldn't do a thing for them...

If worst came to the worst i would try cut a deal with the new guy, say knock 10% off the amount due, best have 90%, than give all your money to lawers ect to follow it up....

tomED

Well I don't want to incriminate myself, but lets just say something was taken away that was pivotal in making what we did for them... work.....

On the companies thing.... they've set that up fairly intelligently aswell. There's about 3 different companies, with the same name, same reg'ed offices and they only liquidated one of these.

The company that bought them are from the UK.

DublinDilbert

tomED wrote:

Well I don't want to incriminate myself, but lets just say something was taken away that was pivotal in making what we did for them... work.....

Hi Tom,

Fair play...

i've seen this messing happen before with molding / tool making companies going bust....

If you supplied a product/tool, and the company was liquidated then this legally belongs to the liquidator, and the liquidator should take possession of it and try sell it to pay off you and other creditors ect...

If the "new" company has possession of the "thing" you supplied, its not theirs, it legally belong to the liquidator!!! surely the liquidator should be going to get this "thing" into their possession? As you said yourself the new company bought the "assets" of the old company, but not the company itself...

If it's only a few grand, and the liquidator cann't easily sell it on, then they might not chase after it ( eg some sort of very specific functional tester ect.. )

seamus

Please check the stickies, and contact a solicitor for legal advice.