Company granted five years to trade back to recovery.
Salford-based Anthony O’Conner & Sons has entered into a Company Voluntary Arrangement (CVA) to avoid the threat of outright administration. Creditors of the company have agreed to the 37p in the pound terms of the CVA that is now payable over the five year term of the arrangement.
“I spent weeks talking to our creditors to find a resolution,” says director Jon O’Connor. “The creditors have been very good. They can see that we have a healthy forward order book and although cash flow is currently average, prospects for the next three years look good.”
DemolitionNews was first alerted of the company’s financial problems when we spotted AOC’s Liebherr R956LC among the lots going to auction at Donington next month. But the company’s woes stretch back further than the acquisition of this unique machine.
“We won several contracts in London. They were carried out professionally but they were bad financially and we had some naïve expectations about their profitability,” O’Connor accepts. “Although other people were involved with the pricing and running of those jobs, the buck stops with me.”
O’Connor reports that the company enjoyed exceptional but unsustainable growth in the past few years. “We saw a 30 percent increase in turnover between 2013 and 2014 but the management structure did not keep pace with that growth.”
The restructuring of the company has seen the workforce reduced by 50 percent although there have been no redundancies.
Editor’s Note: The Anthony O’Connor CVA is the latest example of the Construction News Specialist Awards “kiss of death”. In 2013, EDS won the demolition contractor of the year award; within months, the company had collapsed. Masterton was shortlisted in the awards in 2014 before going into a terminal financial tailspin. And although it did not attend, Anthony O’Connor was shortlisted this year; the awards ceremony taking place as the company was negotiating with its creditors over the CVA.
