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Story: Time collapse support site forced offline

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Posted by: Anonymous (Monday 1 August 2005, 7:32 PM)

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The problem is there was too much truth being spoken there. The head of the Administration team is the same guy who sold Tiny to Time five years ago. That was done in suspicuous circumstances before any other possible buyers even knew about it, let alone given a chance to bid. This time the Administrators seem to be doing their best to sell the remains of Time back to the Mohsans at a knock-down price so they can close the deal in a hurry, but HSBC refuse to let them do it.
Problem is what do they have to sell? The shops are gone (they never made money anyway). The Mohsans skilfully extracted the production unit (VMT) from the crash, and also managed to retain both the Time and Tiny brands for themselves. The ownership of the site is in the hands of a trust fund believed to be controlled by the Mohsan's self-administered pension fund. All thats left is the ongoing service / warranty contracts, some of which are on direct debit basis - but hanging over that is a legacy of five million pounds worth of "cashback" warranties, all due for redemption around now. Theres even a question of whether the whole scam has been deliberately orchestrated over the last five years: the have been long-standing rumours and allegations that there was always an intention to bankrupt the company and run away with the warranty money.

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