Late Filer Gordon Ramsay now reveals all !

Under pressure TV chef Gordon Ramsay has been revealing in the papers today why his company Gordon Ramsay Holdings was a bit reticent in filing financial accounts at Companies House. In March last year in this blog, I was mentioning that the world had not yet seen any financial accounts since August 2005- the reason why Companies House fined him a few thousand quid at the time. Now we discover that in the autumn of last year, his auditors KPMG were advising him to put his organisation into administration as losses mounted due to overambitious overseas expansion.

Which only goes to show that credit reference agencies like Graydon are absolutely right when they automatically withdraw good credit ratings on late filers. Experience has proven there is usually a good reason why companies don’t file on time in keeping with their statutory requirements. Even as I write, Gordon Ramsay Holdings’ latest filed accounts available are for the year ended 31st August 2007. OK, they’re pretty historical, but at least if they’d been filed earlier, one would have seen that bank loans had scarily risen from nothing in 2005 to 3, 500, 000 GBP in 2007.

Fortunately, as Mr Ramsay admits today in the press, he and his father in law have found some millions to pump into the business to save it from going to the wall, but I’m sure not all late filing companies have directors with the same deep pockets, so credit granters beware!