A winding up of Interserve has taken a giant step forward following the resolution of a tax wrangle with Qatari authorities.
Liquidators for Interserve plc, which collapsed in 2019, have now received the greenlight from Qatari officials to sell its shares in Al Binaa Contracting Company.
Authorisation for their sale had eluded liquidators at EY – after they first agreed to sell them two years ago.
In their latest progress report, published on Monday (30 March), Charles King and Alan Hudson said they were “pleased to report that formal tax clearance from the Qatari tax authorities has now been obtained”.
“The joint liquidators are in discussions with the purchaser of the Al Binaa shares to progress the completion of the transfer,” they added, and are receiving advice from Qatari tax advisers.
King and Hudson declined to provide more details due to the “confidentiality and commercial sensitivity surrounding the sale and the related discussions”.
They first agreed to sell off the shares to an unnamed company in 2024, but were held back by “the intricacies of the Qatari tax code and the related processes”.
The liquidators will provide an update on the legal completion of the sale in their next progress report, they said.
EY put Interserve into liquidation in February 2022 after a three-year long administration process of the former company.
The firm collapsed after its shareholders voted down a deleveraging plan, resulting in its subsidiary companies being sold to the group’s lenders in a pre-pack administration.
This led to debt of £815m and other liabilities of more than £200m being effectively wiped out by stakeholders in exchange for equity in the new parent company, Interserve Group Ltd (IGL).
The liquidators said they do “not anticipate” paying out any further funds to Interserve’s creditors, as the proceeds of the sale of the shares in Al Binaa will go to IGL.
Interserve plc had sold its shares in the Qatar group to IGL – which is also now in liquidation – in March 2019.
In 2022, Tilbury Douglas separated from the Interserve Group and until last year was still owned by its former shareholders.
An earlier incarnation of Tilbury Douglas carried out a series of acquisitions in the 1990s, expanding its focus from contracting to facilities management and outsourcing functions, renaming itself Interserve in 2001.
By 2018 it employed 25,000 people in the UK and 70,000 worldwide and turned over £3bn annually, but business was dogged by problems on energy-from-waste contracts and it racked up successive losses and huge debts.
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Joshua Stein