Creditors' fury over truck sale
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Creditors of the failed haulier Dual Carriage are angry that 12 of its trucks have been sold to a company which employs the director's son.
Liverpool-based Trailer Express bought the trucks just before Christmas for a sum reputed to be £35.000—the company was set up to plug the gap in the market left by the demise of Dual Carriage. Its directors are Lee Parkinson, the son of Dual Carriage director John Parkinson, and Roger Taylor said to be a close friend of the Parkinsons.
Dual Carriage went into liquidation last November owing hundreds of thousands to sub-contractors and with a deficiency of £2.7m. It had lost £600,000 in 1999 alone, Many of the creditors believe John Parkinson is behind the new company but this has always been vehemently denied by Trailer Express, which claims to be a creditor of Dual Carriage.
Elia Sanderson, who sits on the Dual Carriage liquidation committee and is owed £13,500, says she is angry she was not consulted over the sale of the vehicles and would have preferred it if they had been sold elsewhere. "Why should they [Trailer Express] benefit?" asks Sanderson. "I think we should have been consulted before the assets were sold." However, Dual Carriage liquidator Ian Millington from Liverpool-based Mitchell Charlesworth stresses that Trailer Express paid more than the trucks would have fetched at auction. "Our first priority is to get the highest price for the assets," he says.
Millington is now investigating Dual Carriage to establish if it was trading while insolvent in the run-up to the liquidation.