Mowlem's internal reorganisation months away

Mowlem’s new chief executive Simon Vivian insists that after making three profit warnings this year there will be “no further surprises” even though his major internal reorganisation is still months away from completion.

Mowlem’s latest financial results, published this morning, show a loss of £15m, well down on the profit of £45m in the previous year. Turnover was little changed at £2.1bn.

Vivian has had to take a series of drastic step to avoid him being associated with management mess-ups of the past.

“Mowlem is not there at the moment,” he said. “As you know I have announced an internal reorganisation as we had a lot of slightly silo-style profit centres which made it difficult to function smoothly as a whole. Internal relationships held us back. Instead, Mowlem will run within just four larger business streams.”

Vivian added that Mowlem employees should have no worries over the deficit in the group’s pension fund of £106m when assessed to the new accounting standard IFRS [which is similar to FRS17] as at 1 January 2005.

“We have a deficit and we have a programme to deal with it over time,” he said.