Actually no.
I was talking to a bloke in a local town with a little record shop. Must have been 15 years back. He was telling me what the costs of running the place were, and it was ridiculous back then. Can't remember now, but it was thousands in rent, more in business rates, and a hefty chunk for electricity. He told me he would stick it out to the end of his lease, and he was going online, he said he was already doing a healthy percentage of his business that way.
So true - there was an silly person in Ipswich who did almost that.
As others have said, sadly no. Often the top company in a deliberately complex structure lends money to the operating company with a charge against assets, so they get their money back first. Another common tactic for a private equity investor is to split any property assets from the operating company and lease them back to them. The operating company goes bust, the holding company is left with the property. That happened with mfi and a big care home group. There are many ways to get money out of a business even if it makes no profit, high interest rates, loan arrangement fees, directors fees and so on. When GM bought SAAB they transferred all the design IP and brand to the parent company and charged SAAB to use it, so GM made money while SAAB made losses. Transfer pricing tricks as well, an intermediate company in the structure buys stock for £X and sells it to the public facing company for £X+, when it all gets a bit tough the bottom company is allowed to go into administration, a lot of cash has already moved up the chain l. HMRC are a preferred creditor but many companies are structured so they, (we the taxpayer) are left with nothing.
The administrators can provide these IIRC.My own fault for not keeping my bookwork up to date but just realised I can't log into my FFX account and download some invoices I need
Quick head up if you ever had dealings with FFX, no doubt their administrators in trying to salvage whatever revenue they can have sold the FFX domain and database of clients to an outfit - ITS and I for one have received marketing spam from them today.
Thanks for the heads up
Just had same email arrive today too. Think I'll bin them off top.
I’ve bought from ITS several times. Prices and service have been good. It makes sense for them to buy the FFX name & domain and it’s proper that they let us know. I’ve seen cases in the past where the new owner has hidden the change in the small print.
I expect the name and domain, together with the subscriber list, came as a package. Anyway, it's quite common for companies to keep using a brand name when they buy assets of a defunct company. Mike Ashley's Frasers Group has a shedload of brand names that exist only as labels on stock.
