tbtc
Veteran Member
Whether or not that was the key plan, I think it's fair to say that it was a surprise to unravel the sheer number of companies with family connections that were involved under the Wrightbus organisation. It would make many people wonder why so many inter-related companies, some with financial arrangements with the others, were necessary.
This is how I'm reading it - it looks like one of those set-ups that has become depressingly familiar in the modern world, where the company that actually does the "work" is beholden to other "sister" companies, so that you can massage away any profits to avoid paying tax on them.
So, whilst it may be profitable to build a bus, the arm that is building the bus may have to pay a licensing fee to another arm, which means the money can end up off-shore or with a charitable wing or whatever - which makes it pretty difficult for someone else to buy out the business (because they wouldn't actually be buying the whole operation). The country seems full of viable businesses that have been designed to make a loss on paper due to the debts lumbered on them or the complex internal agreements that siphon off money to sister companies...
...it's getting to the stage where we might as well abandon Corporation Tax since any savvy business has found ways round it - the only companies paying their fair share are effectively having to subsidise the sharp operators. All of these firms structured to minimise tax liabilities (e.g. when you buy from Amazon, the UK part only gets a fraction of the revenue because all it technically does is fulfil an order that you've placed with the Luxembourg part of Amazon, so the majority of the cash goes to Luxembourg, where they coincidently pay a tiny tax rate).
Looks like a potentially good business gone bad because of the way it's been run, plus a combination of a shrinking bus market, increased competition due to ADL making better vehicles, and the two big contracts that they were most reliant upon (First and TfL) drying up. But I'd be apprehensive about bailing them out, especially since the administration looks like a way of either writing off the liabilities that they don't want (dump the problems on the taxpayer-funded Pension Protection Fund) or a way of forcing the DUP's hand into subsidising a large employer.