Red Letter Days left without FD for 'weeks'
Troubled gift business Red Letter Days left without finance director for weeks after new company seeks to honour customers and unpaid suppliers
Newly-purchased gift experience company Red Letter Days is to continue
trading without a finance director for ‘at least a month’ until an appointment
can be made, according to a spokesman.
The company still has to content with outstanding payments to suppliers and
thousands of customers who hold un-honoured activity vouchers.
‘There has been no decision on the new structure of the finance team as yet
and we are temporarily using resources from Peter Jones’s company, Phones
International and Theo Paphitas, owner of Ryman who jointly purchased the
business last week’, said a spokesman.
‘In the short-term, we have formed an emergency group and we would not get
someone – a finance director – in for a while. It will be soon but not within
the next few weeks.
‘The administrators are still carrying on with their work, while we are doing
a lot of the due diligence work. We are looking more at hiring operational staff
such as call centre employees’, said the RLD spokesman.
Former owner and RLD founder Rachel Elnaugh, who also stars on BBC2’s talent
show Dragons’ Den, was forced to sell the business after it fell into
administration after amounting debts of about £12m.
Elnaugh left the business as soon as it was sold to the new owners. The RLD
spokesman said that she was ‘not part of the takeover package’ and that this
left her with ‘less egg on her face than it would have done if she had stayed’.
Thousands of customer activity vouchers are still outstanding and some
suppliers have still not been paid. White said there was a ’round the clock,
non-stop operation’ and that the cost of the vouchers could run to a
‘considerable sum’.
‘We are purely concentrating on customers with outstanding vouchers and
suppliers with issues’, he said.