Accountancy Age: ICL deal goes ahead despite delay fears
ICL's £500m private finance initiative deal with Customs and Excise went ahead last week, despite fears that it would be delayed by up to six weeks, Accountancy Age reports today.
The transfer was initially due to go ahead on March 19 but an ICL spokeswoman told Accountancy Age last week that that date had been missed.
She said: ‘As far as we are concerned the issue will be resolved in six weeks from last week.’The impression that the deal would be subject to a delay of several weeks was reinforced when a Customs spokesman said: ‘ICL told us the transfer would take no longer than five to six weeks to sort out.’
In a written statement to Accountancy Age, Customs described the delay as ‘disappointing’.
The computer company’s bank, the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, had witheld consent for the transfer to take place because it was seeking to establish who at Customs had the legal authority to sign the contracts.
However the transfer took place at midnight last Friday after the bank wrote to ICL last week to say: ‘[We] were both working through pre agreed procedures for the “transfer of undertakings” under a limited recourse facility and that this procedure simply took [a] few days longer than anticipated to complete.’
The transfer means 230 local Customs IT staff have now transferred from Customs to ICL. During the next 65 weeks some 21,000 new PCs and laptops will be installed throughout the Department.
Audit threshold raised to £1m – but £4.8m to follow