Rok goes into administration

Building services and maintenance contractor Rok has gone into administration and trading in shares of the company have been suspended.

In a statement to the stock exchange earlier this morning the board of Rok plc announced that it had resolved to put the company into administration and to make an application to the Financial Services Authority to suspend the listing and trading of the Company’s Ordinary Shares on the Stock Exchange.

It said that further announcements would be made in due course.

In September there were reports that the firm was understood to be seeking a meeting with its lenders over refinancing. This came a month after issuing its second profit warning of the year after belatedly discovering that a recent acquisition was suffering unknown losses.

In August the firm suspended its finance director Ashley Martin after a profit warning and revelations of “serious failings” in the financial controls of its plumbing business following a review by accountants BDO.

However, Martin was later fully exonerated with the firm blaming the financial problems on “a scaling back of sub-contracting work from the private housing sector and a combination of weak operational, commercial and financial controls within that part of the business”.

Kevin Cammack analyst at Cenkos, described the announcement as unnerving. “Rok has always appeared a bit of a basket case and has had recent issues in its heating and plumbing service delivery and management changes, but this was not expected and Rok had in fact been winning work right up to last week”.