Yes that whole admin business is bent, crooked, dishonest.
I still remember, in 1979, driving to London (those were the days!!) and with the Datsun 100A F2 parked on the pavement in Soho in front of a “gay sex toys and publications” shop, and me hoping nobody recognised me, going into a vast underground basement under the said shop, stacked up to the ceiling with £1000 hard disks etc, operated by an Administrator, and me arguing with the sleazy little sh*it sitting in the chair and about to fall off it due to his stomach overhang, that “this pile of circuit boards” is actually mine, never paid for, so can I please take them away, and him saying “with no serial numbers, and your invoice not showing serial numbers, you can’t prove it” even though they were fully custom circuits, and then smiling while offering to sell them back to me for £x (where x was about 50% of what we were supposed to be paid for them). I told him to stick them where it is warm and dark.
An Admin is judge, jury and executioner. He is generally appointed by the biggest creditor /charge holder and all kinds of allegations are not uncommon.
It is bad law. With centuries’ old tradition of lawmaking, the UK doesn’t have many truly bad laws but this is one such. The counter argument is that the institution of a Ltd Co, and the concept of the Corporate Veil., must be protected, otherwise free enterprise would die. It is easier today to get disqualified as a Director but hey you just need a few sons or daughters to front your next venture 
May be a reason for the relevant historic business decline in the UK? If these administration proceedings are pre destined to fail and be carcasses for administrators to feed off, then arguably risk premiums for business risk, credit or equity, will be structurally higher.
God bless the USA where a lot of mid sized businesses (and large ones) are resurrected through the Chapter 11 process.
Now if there were any MP who had an interest in improving this state of affairs, that would be a godsend. As the law profession tends to produce the most MPs, I fear there may not be much appetite for judicial/procedural reform in the area. :(
Probably in all of Europe. The system works against businesses which involve tangible assets.
This is why FTOs will continue to go bust with millions disappearing: it is dead easy to do. You lease the planes (presumably some don’t because leasing is expensive), premises are rented, the ground school is money for old rope, you rent out DA42 time with a huge margin (~2x over cost), you use the cash which the parents pour in to fund the cash flow, and when it goes belly up you (knowing this well in advance) stick some charges in to rank as a secured creditor, and if you are a big creditor you can be the one who appoints the friendly administrator whose primary job is to satisfy the charges in the correct order
The underlying problem is this and the stupidity of the airlines in wanting an army of very uniform sausages.
RobertL18C wrote:
God bless the USA where a lot of mid sized businesses (and large ones) are resurrected through the Chapter 11 process.
It’s not all milk and honey. In their Chapter 11 proceedings Van’s have blocked the formation of an unsecured creditors committee and engaged in various other practices so as to maximise the degree to which creditors are shafted, chief among them failing to ship any product at all for quite a long time prior to the Ch11 filing whilst rapaciously collecting payment in full. They actually included in their court filings that these payment collections had been ‘accidental’, which was hilarious, but I suppose they needed to lay a cover story before too many customers told the court that they paid in full months ago and received nothing.
I cannot help but feel that point would have got more attention from the court in the UK. Listening to the Van’s court proceedings, one gets an impression of judges, lawyers and ‘restructuring experts’ playing a cosy little game around the elephants in the room. Both systems of bankruptcy work on paper, both are ruined by the sort of plausibly-deniable corruption and nest-feathering you see in both the Van’s and the Tayside cases. The fees being charged by the ‘restructuring experts’ (I guess the equivalent of administrators) in the Van’s case are equally eye-watering and likewise paid before anyone else.
