Bierrum in receivership after losing adjudication

Bierrum Holdings has gone into receivership together with two of its subsidiary slipform concrete businesses, Bierrum & Partners and Bierrum Structural Services.

However, Pendrich Height Services, a £3.5m-a-year turnover steeplejack business based in Edinburgh, is trading normally and is up for sale.

Bierrum's financial difficulties stem from two loss-making contracts together with the battle for opportunities in the power sector where workload is reported by Frank Dalton, group managing director, to be "at an all-time low".

He said there have been 80 redundancies in the slipform businesses, leaving 50 remaining employees still at work. Both the Bierrum businesses are for sale, although receiver PricewaterhouseCoopers reports no interest to date.

However, Dalton is more optimistic. He said: "Apart from the two loss-making contracts, the other contracts were all reasonably profitable, so they could find a buyer."

Details of the two loss-making contracts are sketchy. One is the outcome of an unfavourable adjudication and the other was overseas. Bierrum's joint venture with Mowlem involving the slipform construction of the reinforced concrete Spinnaker Tower at Portsmouth is not the cause of the current problems. With only snagging work still to do, Mowlem has taken over the completion of the scheme.

Bierrum Holdings' latest financial results cover the 12 months to the end of April 2001. They show a leap in turnover to £19m from the previous year's figure of £9m with pre-tax profit rising six-fold to more than £300,000.

Alongside work in the power generating sector, Bierrum broke into a brand new market that year when it won the contract to slipform the building core of a high-rise office development at Canary Wharf in London's Docklands. A second contract soon followed.

Bierrum and Partners, the UK concrete slipform business, accounted for the surge in the group's turnover as it jumped from a £6m turnover in 2000 to £17m in 2001. Its pre-tax profit rose to £310,000 from £62,000 in 2000, which helped ease the retained loss carried forward from £930,000 to £620,000.

More recent figures are yet to be filed at Companies House.

Colin McCurdy, managing director of Pendrich, left two weeks ago. Dalton is reported to be running Pendrich as both finance director and chairman on a temporary basis. The announcement of a trade sale is expected later this week.

Pendrich provides a range of access and steeplejack activities in the UK, Ireland and continental Europe. These range from abseiling techniques to fully boarded scaffold systems. Its main areas of operation are churches, chimneys, structures and lightning protection. Overseas, it has recently worked on chimney contracts in Holland, France and Cyprus.