An award-winning North East company is to be liquidated after efforts to find a buyer proved unsuccessful.
Flame Heating Spares, which was based in Boldon, South Tyneside, had been tipped for huge success after a number of award wins including the Let’s Grow Award at the 2018 North East Business Awards.
In March, however, it emerged that attempts were being made to save the business, founded by John Savage, after experiencing difficult trading conditions late in 2019 following the general downturn in the property market.
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FHS Durham Ltd, which traded as Flame Heating Services, brought in business support experts from Newcastle’s office of RSM in a bid to find a buyer that could keep the company afloat.
But in April, a month after shutting all its sites around the North East and Scotland while looking for a new owner, the company went into administration.
Latest documents filed by the firm show that it is now set to be liquidated. Administrators at RSM were officially appointed as liquidators by the business on May 18, when resolutions for winding up the business were also put in place.
Documents filed at Companies House show that a general meeting on FHS Durham Ltd, which traded as Flame Heating Services, was held in South Shields on May 18.
The document states: “On 18 May 2020, the following Special Resolution and Ordinary Resolutions were passed:
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“That it has been proved to the satisfaction of this meeting that the Company cannot, by reason of its liabilities, continue its business, and that it is advisable to wind up the Company, and accordingly that the Company be wound up voluntarily and that Steven Philip Ross and Matthew James Higgins both of RSM Restructuring Advisory LLP, be and are hereby appointed Joint Liquidators for purposes of such winding up.”
The company was founded by in 2011 by Mr Savage, who was named National Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year in 2017.
It had branches in the North East at Team Valley, Cramlington, Durham, South Shields and Sunderland, plus sites in Carlisle, Edinburgh and Glasgow.
Two years ago the business secured a £4m funding deal which triggered rapid growth and the creation of 60 new jobs, but in March it said that “experienced difficult trading conditions during the latter part of 2019, during the general down-turn in the property market.”
At the time, the company added that an improvement in trading in the early part of 2020 had foundered due to the drop in consumer confidence caused by the coronavirus outbreak.