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No Christmas joy at Fransen Transport

21st December 2006
Page 6
Page 6, 21st December 2006 — No Christmas joy at Fransen Transport
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Fransen has joined the casualty list at Cherrystone Investments, which bought the reefer specialist with its own money. Dominic Perry reports.

HENK BUZ1NK IS sitting in his office surrounded by 30 years of memories and wondering where it all went wrong.

Until March,Buzink wasdirector of Kidderminister-based Fransen Transport. Bags of old tacho charts are piled up on his office floor, and on the wall are pictures of iceencrusted trucks battling through the Russian winter memories of happier times when Fransen was a trailblazer, taking refrigerated loads to far-flung locations.

Buzink has seen a number of owners come and go during his years in this country, though his accent betrays his Dutch roots. When rates to those exotic destinations became unviable Fransen concentrated on what it did best running temperaturecontrolled loads all over Europe.

But despite Fransen's success, its previous owners. Pulleyn Transport, decided to sell it off late last year. Buzink looked at buying it himself but felt this would complicate his plannedretirement.Instead the firm was snapped up by Cherrystone Investments, which used Fransen's own capital to fund the deal.

Buzink stayed on to help with the transition the new owners had promised to build the firm up into a successful haulage business as part of a group of three transport firms.

But the firm was destined to last less than a year. Instead of a thriving business Buzink found himself struggling to make ends meet as cash was passed on from Fransen to fund other group activities. Administrators were called in at the beginning of November when the firm finally ran out of money.

Buzink had already tendered his resignation in June "because I didn't want my name dragged through it any more".

He admits it has been a tough time: "The last few months have been very sad. Emptying out this office has been hard going. I came here months after it started in 1972 and then came back in 1985 it's very much my baby."

Administrators from SF Plant are trying to discover what went wrong; no one from Cherrystone was available for comment.

• For more on what happened at Fransen, see CM's investigation on page 28.

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Locations: Kidderminister

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