‘Former employees’ of ISG are owed at least £72.3m by the collapsed contractor, administrators for the collapsed firm have calculated.
Statements of affairs for seven of the eight ISG subsidiaries that entered administration in September were published on Companies House this weekend.
They also show that HMRC is owed £54.4m in total by the seven entities.
Across the seven ISG companies for which the statements of affairs have been published, former employees are owed £3.8m as preferential creditors for things such as wages and holiday pay, while another £68.5m is owed to staff in unsecured claims.
Employees who become preferential creditors are usually those who keep their jobs for a fortnight following the start of an administration process.
They are entitled to claim wages for up to four months prior to an administration, with a limit of £800 per employee and up to six weeks of holiday pay. Any amount above the total can be considered as an unsecured claim.
Preferential creditors are first in line for payments recouped from asset sales, however the administrators’ reports show there is likely to be a large shortfall in the money available to them via this method.
Ex-employees will likely need to apply to the government’s Redundancy Payment Service for money they are owe
Meanwhile, one industry source suggested other money such as that owed to shareholders who were also employees might be included in the £72.3m owed to the unsecured former staff members.
It has not yet been revealed how much ISG Fit Out owed when it went into administration. This, and new claims from the supply chain could mean the overall amounts owed rise further.
Construction News reported earlier today that trade creditors were owed £195m by the group.
Further analysis of those figures shows that 27 individual companies were owed more than £1m by ISG.
These include M&E specialist Michael J Lonsdale, which itself went into administration in October 2023 citing inflation and a hit to its credit rating, owing more than £120m to other companies.
ISG Engineering owed Lonsdale £1.1m, and ISG Construction owed it another £123,000.
According to its last filed accounts, ISG had just over 3,000 staff and a total monthly wage bill of £22.1m.
ISG, which turned over £2.2bn in 2022 and made a pre-tax profit of £11.5m, went under after a long-running effort to sell the business broke down last month.
