A JOURNEY THROUGH PROVENANCE

WHY BUSINESSCARE? :: We let our results do the talking

Three Wheels on my Wagon
On the recommendation of a firm of City solicitors, we became administrator of the company manufacturing the world's best known 3-wheeled car, immortalised in Only Fools and Horses. Just ten months previously, the original company has been placed into receivership and the receivers – from one of the world's largest accounting organisations – had sold the assets to “our” company. The company's bankers had been advised by their own reporting accountants that the bank was unlikely to recover anything other than perhaps a few thousand pounds from book debts.

Following appointment we recognised the potential value to the company of owning the Intellectual Property Rights in its own engine and gearbox and sought to capitalise on this by approaching manufacturing industries in emerging countries in other parts of the world.

Within less than the six months, we had sold the IPR (retaining the UK manufacturing rights) to a foreign purchaser for a minimum down payment of half a million pounds. The bank consequently received an unexpected windfall of over £300,000 due under a cross-guarantee. Ten months before our appointment, these same rights had been acquired by the company from the previous company's administrative receivers, for just five thousand pounds .

Meanwhile, our own in-house mechanical engineer (who in an earlier life had built Panther motor-cycles) supervised continued production, the business was successfully sold as a going concern and, in the worlds of the song, the [Red Red] Robin kept bob-bob bobbing along.