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• More than 1,100 staff at City Logistics face Easter
Page 7
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on the dole after the firm's joint administrators decided the company no longer has a future and will be wound down.
The Milton-Keynes-based group, which carries goods for many blue-chip companies, is expected to cease operations before the Easter Bank Holiday.
The news will shock the company's employees, most of whom thought the troubled firm would be sold as a going concern after the City Group was put into administration in January.
The administrators, Andersen, received several enquiries from firms interested in buying parts nf the business, but a statement from the joint administrators on Tuesday (19 March) declared: "It has not been possible to restructure or sell the business in such a way as to secure its long-term viability, Accordingly we have no alternative but to commence a managed wind-down of the group's operations over the next two to three weeks."
The closure comes as bad news for Renault, which had supplied the company with 600 trucks through a variety of finance schemes.
"We worked closely with the administrators to try to salvage the business but it appears to have been taken out of our hands. We, like everyone else, are waiting to see what happens," says Renault's marketing manager Euan Harron.
City's demise leaves clients like Coca Cola, Tesco and British Gypsum needing to find replacement hauliers at short notice. Ex-RI-IA chairman John Bridge sold his Huntingdon-based firm CW Bridge to City and started working for the company last May.
"Ali the signs then suggested we had a better future with City," he says. "I looked at the figures and the balance sheet suggested the company was going from strength to strength—what has happened since then?'
im City Logistics was started in 1979 by David Gee and expanded very quickly. It enjoyed the distinction of being the only haulier to make The Sunday Times Profit Track 100 during 2000. About 800 drivers are thought to be out of work as a result of City's closure.
One of them says the drivers were told last Friday that the firm was to shut but have yet to be told why. He adds: "When the administrators came in we were told that our jobs were safe. Now look what's happened."