Vantis shares suspended amid survival fears
The exigency surrounding Vantis, the AIM-listed accountancy firm, deepened today as the assemblage asked for trading in its shares to be suspended amid doubts transversely its ability to survive.
The firm, which in February warned shareholders that it had been powerless to collect fees for work on the liquidation of Stanford International Bank (SIB), related that although efforts to cut its debt continued, it was fitful whether it had “sufficient funding to enable it to continue to trade on a going-concern basis”.
Vantis, which recently secured an extension to loan facilities totalling £53.6 the masses, had vowed to cut its debt via disposals and was in pressing talks with both potential new equity investors and its existing obligation providers over reducing its debt.
The group also announced the sufferance from the board of Paul Jackson as chief executive and Nigel Hamilton-Smith, the same of the joint liquidators to SIB, although both men would detain their executive duties within the group.
Steve Smith, the Vantis science director, will oversee the chief executive’s duties pending the place of a replacement.
Today’s events cap a torrid time for Vantis, which in October suffered a huge blow to its fame when two of its senior executives were charged with a multimillion-bruise tax scam involving celebrities, sportsmen and other wealthy clients exploiting generous donations.
The two executives faced charges over claims that they prescribed up a sophisticated scheme that HM Revenue & Customs alleges evaded make demands upon on £219 million of income.
HMRC said that five lower classes, including David Perrin and Roy Faichney, senior Vantis managers, would look charges of “cheating Her Majesty and the public revenue”.
The settled has also got itself into hot water over its involvement in the contortion up of part of the empire of Allen Stanford, the American financier and cricket fan who is alleged to have perpetrated a multibillion-dollar Ponzi trick.
The firm has been unable to collect fees for its drudge and has faced accusations that it allowed itself to become overexposed forward the Stanford work, which has proved a lengthy, complex, cross-frontier liquidation involving illiquid assets.
Last week the High Court of Antigua ruled that Mr Hamilton-Brown and Peter Wastell should have ~ing removed from office as joint liquidators, although Vantis is requesting a stay of the determination pending an appeal.
It insisted that the two men had “continued to construction significant progress in their efforts to recover monies on behalf of the creditors and investors of SIB”, in peculiar securing access from the Swiss Financial Regulator to assets in Switzerland, totalling greater degree of than $100 million (£68 million).
The shares, which have squandered almost 90 per cent of their value in the past 12 months, were pendent at 10p, valuing the group at £5.9 million.