This is a success story. It could have been something a lot worse.
A business owner I know got into difficulties, and he had to liquidate his company. He chose the cheapest liquidators on the market, and left them to get on with their work.
He then received some very aggressive letters from solicitors instructed by the liquidators, suggesting that he had drawn illegal dividends in the last few years of the company’s operations, and demanding repayment of £60,000 to the company so that the creditors could be paid.
When I got involved, I obtained the data of the company on Free Agent. I then ran the monthly profit and loss accounts from the Free Agent data – 36 monthly accounts in all. It was clear that the company, according to the monthly accounts, was making profits to justify the dividends.
The conversation then turned to cash drawn from the company after the date of its last published accounts, and whether that cash should be repaid by the business owner. I made the point that you could not tell if profits, available to be drawn by the owner, had been made in the period without drawing up accounts based on generally accepted accounting principles and in accordance with company legislation. Such accounts would be of no use to the business owner or to the authorities such as HMRC and Companies House. I was not going to produce them unless the liquidators, or their legal representatives, paid me to do so.
The liquidators have just now agreed in writing to cease chasing the business owner for money.
This illustrates the danger of choosing the cheapest option – it always has some other way of making up its money, and that other way is often far from pleasant.
If you are reading this and are being pursued by the horrors over a business issue – be they HMRC horrors, Child Support horrors, Home Office horrors, liquidation horrors, or whoever – I would be only too happy to help you as I did the business owner mentioned above. I will consider your circumstances and let you know if there is a realistic chance of banishing them.
I hope we can all have a peaceful future.