JustBritish

A former consultant for MG Rover has bought LDV vans.

Qu Li, who became known for her personal relationship with one of the directors of MG Rover while working as a consultant for the company, confirmed yesterday that she had acquired the assets of the company, through her engineering firm Eco Concept Limited.
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Many trade creditors hit in the pocket by the collapse of Longbridge are missing out on a £40 million-plus nest egg – more than four years on from the demise of MG Rover.

An unspecified number of potential claims from the UK and overseas – worth nearly half a billion pounds – have not materialized since the Birmingham car firm closed in April 2005, it was revealed yesterday.

Administrators Pricewaterhouse-Coopers disclosed in the latest Joint Liquidators Report that up to £464 million of further claims could still be admitted despite the increasing time gap.

With two dividends amounting to a total of 6p in the pound already paid to approved claimants some creditors are forgoing sums of many thousands of pounds.
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Whilst the Phoenix Four – via their media spokesperson – engage in an a somewhat unseemly public spat over who was responsible for the collapse of MG Rover four years ago with the loss of 6,300 jobs at Longbridge and several thousand more in the wider economy, we need to remember who really lost out here. I doubt if it was the Phoenix Four, who did rather well out of the whole affair – after all their remuneration, pensions and other benefits ran into the millions.

Rather, it is the workers and their families, who deserve some answers as to what went so wrong at MG Rover under Phoenix’s stewardship.

Lord Mandelson’s statement earlier this week that the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) is to investigate the circumstances surrounding the collapse MG Rover back in 2005 did genuinely come as a surprise in that if there were grounds for calling in the SFO, one wonders why it wasn’t done much earlier.

However, Mandelson was acting on the advice of government lawyers, and I don’t buy the argument that is an attempt to kick the report into ‘the long grass’ as some on the Tory benches have claimed. In fact, the government has attracted a lot of political flack for doing this.
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MPs have demanded a government-backed inquiry into the collapse of MG Rover is forced to publish its findings.

The independent investigation began in June 2005 but has so far not reported any of its conclusions. In January it was revealed it had cost £11.8m.

The Birmingham car maker went bust in April 2005 with the loss of 6,000 jobs.

The business and enterprise committee of MPs has called for the findings to be made public, but the government has refused to set inspectors a deadline.

The government called in fraud and insolvency specialists to help the official inquiry into the failure of the firm, which was bought by Nanjing Automobile Corporation in July 2005.

‘Community destroyed’

Mid-Worcestershire Conservative MP Peter Luff, who chairs the business and enterprise committee, said the inquiry had taken long enough.
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From today’s “Financial Times Limited” come another story about the hopeful return of MG to the market.

China’s Shanghai Automotive (SAIC) hopes to begin producing the MG TF roadster in Nanjing in May and at its plant in Longbridge, UK, within three months of that date, a senior executive said yesterday.

But SAIC admitted the car’s long-awaited relaunch could be delayed again as it grapples with quality issues and rebuilds tooling bought in 2005 from bankrupt MG Rover and shipped to China by Nanjing Automobile (NAC), with which SAIC merged in December.

“We want to begin production of cars at Longbridge as soon as possible, but the first priority for us is the quality of the product,” Chen Hong, SAIC’s president, told the Financial Times yesterday.

“If we launch the product on the UK market and don’t have sufficient quality to meet customers’ expectations, we damage the brand.”
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