Thousands of pounds are owed by the mighty retail giant to printers while ahead of them is a long queue of creditors including the Inland Revenue, VAT, the banks, the landlords and of course around 11,000 staff employed directly or indirectly by the firm.
Ian Carrott of the print credit outfit ICSM says that considering that BHS owes around £48m then the hundreds of thousands of unpaid invoices from printers suggest the industry got off lightly. But ten thousand pounds in anybody’s money is enough to sink many a company and seriously damage fairly large businesses.
ICSM report that the following have potentially lost out: Clicks £10.8k; Image Data Group £4.1k; Image Factory Retail Graphics £4.2k; Kolorkraft £20k; N J Screenprint £35.9; Showcard Print £32.3k; S P Group £11k; Superior Creative £13.7k; Tapestry MM £7.3k (Photo BG); and B M Fashions Ltd (trading as Fashion UK) have taken a £78k hit.
Carrott says: “For once the print sector got off lightly, with a total of £217.3k split between 10 companies from the print sector. Mind you that’s still an average of £21.7k each, so at an individual level may well be quite significant. No current ICSM members got caught though. Fact.”
Currently BHS is in administration and is likely to be wound up this summer despite continued rumours of a buy-out. BHS, sold by Sir Philip last year for £1 to a former used car salesman Dominic Chappell who has blamed the store’s demise on Green who in turn has blamed his advisors and Chappell. Green, the billionaire owner of the Arcadia retail empire has been accused of taking money out of BHS while the pension fund sank deep into deficit. However he told MPs last week the pension situation would be ‘sorted.’
BHS’s administrators Duff & Phelps have said they have failed to find a buyer and that all 163 stores would be holding closing sales over the coming weeks. Unsecured creditors will share in a dividend of what’s left after the secured creditors have been paid which could be very little if anything.
