Grant Thornton partner puts 844 companies into adminstration
Nick Wood to act as administrator of 844 companies managed and created by Safe Solutions Accounting
Grant Thornton
partner Nick Wood has taken the unprecedented step of gaining a successful
application to act as administrator of 844 UK limited companies.
The 844 companies were managed and created by Safe Solutions Accounting, in a
system that involved them being set up to enable overseas contractors working in
the UK to pay lower taxes.
Safe Solutions Accounting went into financial difficulty in 2005, and
following an investigation by Grant Thornton’s Nick Wood and James Earp it was
allegedly found that Safe Solutions Accounting took larger amounts of money in
fees than it required for managing the companies.
It was decided that the best return possible for HM Revenue & Customs,
the main creditor of the companies, was to place them into administration rather
than liquidate them.
‘There are more costs involved in liquidating, we will save around £1m by not
having to pay the DTI to wind up the companies, for example,’ said Wood.
He expects HMRC to be
paid out about £17m.
Safe Solutions Accounting was liquidated in 2005, and its assets were sold by
Nick Wood to new management, led by Ruth Blakemore, under new name Safe
Solutions International.
There are no management or operational links between the old company and the
new company.
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