The size of the financial disaster that befell the creditors of the collapsed Barge Inn community project at Honeystreet, near Pewsey, is revealed in the winding up ‘statement of affairs’.
There were two companies involved in running the project which was backed with £478,920 of grants from the Big Lottery Fund – including the Big Lottery Fund’s Village SOS programme. Both companies have gone into liquidation and are being wound up.
The Barge Inn Community Project Limited had one secured creditor – the Big Lottery Fund itself to whom the company had granted a legal charge. In fact the Big Lottery was this company’s only significant creditor being owed £371,829.
The declared assets to set against this debt are a bank balance of £8 and a loan from one of the directors (John Brewin) of £1,250. Leaving a very large debt.
The winding up of The Barge Inn Trading Company Limited is a much more complicated affair.
The preferential creditors are the eighteen former staff who are not owed any wages but some of whom are owed holiday pay totalling £2,794. This company’s bank balance at the time it ceased trading will pay £1,305 of this – leaving a deficit owed to staff of £1,489.
The Trading Company’s largest creditor is Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs which is owed an estimated £85,920 in unpaid VAT and another £5,879 in unremitted PAYE money.
Other creditors include a loan of £28,729 in the name of one of the company’s directors, Nigel Chesser of Calne. The Devizes branch of Lloyds TSB has an outstanding loan to the company of £24,108. And Pewsey Area Community (Enterprises) Limited is owed £13,935.
Wiltshire Council claims it is owed £390 for domestic rates and £4,260 for business rates, but these sums are disputed by the now defunct company.
On top of these creditors there are various suppliers of food, services and utilities. Altogether this company owes £183,708 to its creditors.
The total owed to creditors by the community project’s two companies is £554,225.
At the end of last year, the Big Lottery told Marlborough News Online that it was seeking to recover part of the grant and had begun legal proceedings to recoup what it is owed.
NOTE: The Big Lottery Fund has changed their figure for the total amount of funds the Barge Inn Community Project received from their programmes. They had double counted one payment. The correct sum for the total amount of funding paid to the Project is £478,920.