On 9 August 2013, Skipton Building Society and other mutuals sold their shares in Mutual One to the highly-indebted accountancy firm RSM Tenon.
Today RSM Tenon group appointed administrators and suspended its shares. The administrators agreed a sale of RSM Tenon’s trading entities to Baker Tilly. Subject to the approval of shareholders and regulators, the sale is expected to complete within two weeks.
An RSM Tenon spokesman confirmed that apart from the change of ownership, Mutual One would not be affected by the group’s problems.
Lloyds Banking Group pulled its financing facilities for RSM Tenon this morning, meaning the firm does not expect to continue to be able to meets its liabilities, and takeover talks with Baker Tilly fell through.
The board decided to appoint administrators, who oversaw a sale of the trading entities. RSM Tenon Ltd and the other principal trading entities would continue to trade as normal and were not affected by the group’s situation, the company said.
RSM Tenon announced on 16 August that it was likely that, as a consequence of the company’s high debt level, if an offer was made by Baker Tilly, minimal value, if any, would be attributed to the issued share capital of the company.
The sale agreed by the joint administrators will realise no value for the ordinary shares of the company.
At 31 December 2012, the RSM Tenon had net borrowings of £80.4m. The terms of the sale agreement mean that Lloyds will not recover its secured debt in full.
RSM Tenon’s trading entities have not entered into insolvency proceedings and will continue to trade as normal. As a result no employees, clients or suppliers – other than Lloyds – are expected to be materially affected.
The company’s ordinary shares have been suspended from trading with immediate effect.
It is expected that, the joint administrators, on behalf of the company, will request the UK Listing Authority to cancel the company’s ordinary shares of 1p each from admission to the Official List of the UK Listing Authority.
