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Creditors could be 8 times better off with Moseley

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1.5K views 20 replies 9 participants last post by  streetrover  
#1 ·
Spoke to an MGR creditor this evening, who is expecting to get little more than 5p in the £ for monies outstanding from MG Rover.

Made me realise that if Martyn Moseley's bid were to succeed, they'd probably be 8 times better off given his offer to establish a £40m suppliers' fund!

Regards

John
 
#2 ·
JohnSwitzer said:
Spoke to an MGR creditor this evening, who is expecting to get little more than 5p in the £ for monies outstanding from MG Rover.

Made me realise that if Martyn Moseley's bid were to succeed, they'd probably be 8 times better off given his offer to establish a £40m suppliers' fund!

Regards

John
So are they aware of this offer? and if they are, what if anything are they going to do about it?
 
#3 ·
I doubt anything, I thought the role of administration was to do whats is best for the business, where as the role of the receivers is to do whats best for the creditors etc. Given they were in administration i don't believe the choice of what to do was made solely for their benefit.

I've always believed the reason Moseley didn't get the bid was because PWC had no faith in his plan.
 
#4 ·
But that is the whole point - if the dealer network actually stood up to PwC and asked the difficult questions, then Martyn would succeed.

Mind you, I guess that won't happen, because the Chairman of the Dealers Association, Richard Cort, is backing another horse. Conflict of interest or what!
 
#9 ·
Hmmm. We've all got different sources of information, and of course we are all being given 'facts' as seen by these different parties.

The problem is, they are just tit-bits. None of us are seeing the whole picture, and the information we do have is spun to give a particular point of view.

Want an example? How about the information that came up about SAIC being confident they had won MG-Rover literally minutes before the official announcement that Nanjing had won the business.

For the same reason I am wondering how serious the Martin Mosley bid actually was. I know John has spoken to Martin several times, but in the big picture, there will have had to have been some very good reasons for PWC to reject his bid, and I don't believe it would have been down to Governmental intervention or pressure from within Phoenix.

PWC are a highly professional company - if half the stuff said about them on this forum were true, they would very quickly end up in court for professional misconduct. I don't think PWC are going to make that mistake in a hurry.

The reality is that we don't know. And we won't know the full story for some time to come - if ever at all.
 
#11 ·
boxwellm said:
Hmmm. We've all got different sources of information, and of course we are all being given 'facts' as seen by these different parties.

The problem is, they are just tit-bits. None of us are seeing the whole picture, and the information we do have is spun to give a particular point of view.

The reality is that we don't know. And we won't know the full story for some time to come - if ever at all.
Well said !

I'm getting tired of the continual posts/threads championing the Moseley bid and rubishing the Nanjing bid.

Please give Nanjing a chance, all of this doubting will do nothing except make Nanjing wonder why the hell they bothered !
 
#13 ·
If you don't mind I'd rather wait and see what happens before commenting on media speculation.

As far as I'm concerned Nanjing are considering a partner for the UK operations and are currently recruiting a British management team.

I also look forward to the announcement this week regarding the continued use of Longbridge for both production and R&D.
 
#14 ·
But where is Nanjing's money coming from? They're a very small company, unprofitable (they made a loss last year), and seem to have bitten off more than they can chew. They only really wanted the 45 line and the engines, and I really can't believe that they'll ever do any more than that. They only wanted 30-50 acres of Longbridge (which is about 600 acres in total), which I think says it all about the scale of even what they were proposing, which I don't think they'll do anyway.

I don't know how serious the Moseley bid ever was, but as far as I can see, it's the only liklihood of there ever being another real MG or Rover. Without that, I fear all we'll see are some Chinese made Nanjings whose only connection to MG is the plastic badge on the bonnet. And that, for me, isn't worth having. I doubt if Nanjing even know who Cecil Kimber was.

And even that assumes that Nanjing survives. I know they made a loss last year - were they profitable before that, or are they in ongoing financial trouble? Is the state government likely to bale them out if they crash?
 
#16 ·
*DLN* said:
They (Nanjing) have stated that finance isn't a problem, however I don't think it will be a long term issue as I expect Nanjing and SAIC to team up in the near future and select Martin Leach to head the UK operations.
But MGR also stated that finance wasn't a problem shortly before the company crashed with £1.4 billions of debt and 6,000 men given their cards...
 
#19 ·
BrianR said:
They only wanted 30-50 acres of Longbridge (which is about 600 acres in total), which I think says it all about the scale of even what they were proposing

Longbridge is huge. I mean, really huge. It was once the largest car manufacturing plant in the world. Even today, the body-in-white plant is the biggest in Europe.

MG-Rover didn't need such a large site - they could probably have got rid of half the site without anyone even noticing! In fact, it is a shame they didn't get the planning permissions to redevelop it as a science park and then sell off large chunks - they would have raised an awful lot more money that way.

I have been told by a very strong source (my milkmans next door neighbours cousin - twice removed) that the long term plan for Pheonix was to develop a new factory at Longbridge taking up only 50-60 acres of land anyway.
 
#20 ·
Schtopper said:
I doubt anything, I thought the role of administration was to do whats is best for the business, where as the role of the receivers is to do whats best for the creditors etc. Given they were in administration i don't believe the choice of what to do was made solely for their benefit.

I've always believed the reason Moseley didn't get the bid was because PWC had no faith in his plan.
Yes the role of administrators is to provisionally settle with creditors and HMG - then attempt to keep the business on-going. This might involve mothballing it if insolvency forces the issue. They will look to bring in investment and management, change the board etc. In these situations, invariably the chairman and board of directors want to sell and unless money comes into the business (with few if any strings attatched) they will auction the business. Naturally, once the affairs of the business are completed, a final settlement is arranged with the creditors, though I'm not sure how much difference rthis can make.

PwC wasted no time in agreeing with the creditors a harsh provisional settlement based on the supposed virtual impossiblity of resuming or redeveloping the business.

They then took advice from the likes of Warwick Manufacturing Group, and the various so-called experts (not the great Garel Rys I may add) who share the view of the P4 - that anyone like moseley who wanted to restart MGR was off their rocker. Unlike that guy who wanted to bring back Jensen with 800 cars a year sales and 6 nationwide dealerships...

Of course they had no faith in Moseley's plan! That doesn't mean it wasn't a good idea.

And the tragedy is the creditors will end up with an appalling settlement, the business broken up and shipped to China, and that Jenson-style project will be the end result.

All because of a belief.
 
#21 ·
boxwellm said:
Want an example? How about the information that came up about SAIC being confident they had won MG-Rover literally minutes before the official announcement that Nanjing had won the business.
Sounds like revenge for pulling out of the JV literally minutes before...

For the same reason I am wondering how serious the Martin Mosley bid actually was. I know John has spoken to Martin several times, but in the big picture, there will have had to have been some very good reasons for PWC to reject his bid, and I don't believe it would have been down to Governmental intervention or pressure from within Phoenix.

PWC are a highly professional company - if half the stuff said about them on this forum were true, they would very quickly end up in court for professional misconduct. I don't think PWC are going to make that mistake in a hurry.

The reality is that we don't know. And we won't know the full story for some time to come - if ever at all.
PwC took their advice from automotive consultants precisely bewcause they were scared whitless in case they messed this BIG admin operation up.

We know what those individuals think of people who want to develop volume manufacturing at sights like Longbridge.

PwC are working for the P4 and were called in as advisors initially - it wasn't creditors calling them in to oust the P4 as sometimes happens. If the P4 were simply in the background or out of the loop altogether, then, yes, their opinions would be igonred. But they are not, and they have been involved in the sell on of the business. There has been claims that they will be among those employed by the new owners.

The P4 in their own words turned down bank offers (and alledgedly moseley when he came knocking) long before any credit rating was sunk. They talked of only wanting and only needing to be a niche volume manufacturer. In their professional opinion it was imperative to sell on MGR. Even the idea of JV's was always about making MGR a junior partner. This is what was done under Honda, and this is all the P4 believed in. Anything but invest.

You can imagine what can happen if PwC - in their desire to stick to a professional opinion - have these people to advise them.

They would have given Moseley less than 5 minutes.