Ex-Innovate Logistics staff to receive payments

Ex-employees of defunct business Innovate Logistics will receive surprise payments three years after the business was dissolved, after the administrators applied for a £470,000 rates rebate.

Harry Yearsley is also in line for a payment after it helped pay staff wages at the time of Innovate’s administration more than six years ago.

A spokeswoman for insolvency practitioners BDO LLP said it had been unaware at the time of the chilled logistics firm’s collapse of the possibility of a rates refund from Derbyshire Council.

However, in order that a distribution could be made, the business had to be restored to the Companies Register and BDO re-appointed as administrators.

She said there were three types of preferential creditor that would benefit from the money: Innovate employees, the redundancy payments office and haulier Harry Yearsley, which bought the firm’s frozen unit, saving 550 employees, in 2008.

The spokeswoman said Yearsley would benefit “in respect of funds it advanced to the administrators to enable them to pay arrears of salary owed to staff at the time of the first administration.”

A report filed at Companies House said there remained insufficient assets for any distribution to trade creditors: “The position is that there are outstanding expenses and preferential claims unpaid in the first administration to permit any distribution of funds to the unsecured creditor population.”