Historic Chesterfield furniture store Eyres closed with £2.4m shortfall – with customers and HMRC owed hundreds of thousands

Eyres of Chesterfield ceased trading in April 2022 after 147 years – failing to secure the “critical funding” needed to survive.

The company has since entered liquidation – appointing Mike Dillon and Andrew Poxon, both of Leonard Curtis, Riverside House, Irwell Street, Manchester, as their liquidators.

In a statement of affairs published to Companies House, the liquidators stated that Eyres owed a sum of £950,000 to Allica Bank.

Preferential creditors include the company’s former employees. Eyres employed 11 full-time staff, who were made redundant last April – and all of these employees have claims for outstanding wages and holiday pay, totalling £10,196.

HMRC is listed as a secondary preferential creditor – with the company’s debts estimated to include £275,398 in VAT and £130,787 in PAYE/Employees National Insurance.

The company’s employees are also included again as unsecured creditors – relating to a separate claim for £71,073 in redundancy and notice pay.

Eyres customers were reported to have been left £110,178 out of pocket when the store closed – with debts of £401,501 also owed to the company’s trade and expense creditors.

A figure of £449,528 is also owed to company director Alan Rees, and an unpaid bounceback loan of £50,000 was also listed in Eyres’ financial records

The company’s liquidators said that Eyres owes £14,627 in Corporation Tax – and added that the above figures should not be considered to be agreed.

The liquidators report said: “Subsequent to the accounts to February 28 2021, the property was sold to MS 001.”

Alan Rees is also the director of MS 001 Limited, whose registered office address is the former Eyres store on Holywell Street. The nature of the business was described by Companies House as “activities of other holding companies not elsewhere classified.”

The property was sold to MS 001 “in the sum of £1.15 million and the amounts owing to Shawbrook Bank, the lender at the time who was owed £950,000, were repaid. Whilst £950,000 was paid against the sales price, by way of refinancing, a sum of £200,000 remains outstanding.

“Any recovery from MS 001 will likely be dependent on its financial position, which will be fully investigated, along with the background to the debts, following the appointment of the joint liquidators. As such, the realisable value of these sums are currently uncertain.”

A shortfall of £2.4 million was reported by the liquidators – and the last financial records available to them showed that the company’s account holds a credit balance of just £124. They estimated that another £14,000 could be raised from the sale of the company’s remaining tangible assets.

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Back in May, the Derbyshire Times was contacted by two individuals, who wished to remain anonymous, stating that employees were paid with furniture in the weeks before Eyres closed its doors.

One customer who paid a deposit of over £700, more than a year before the closure, later found out that his order had never actually been placed – describing it as a “punch in the guts.”