Liquidator appointed to Centralis

Citrix partner went into administration earlier this year owing nearly £400,000 to creditors

A liquidator has been appointed for Centralis, a former high-flying Citrix partner that fell into administration earlier this year with debts of nearly £400,000.

FRP Advisory was appointed as administrator on 11 February, and is now the liquidator, with Centralis owing at least £388,000 to creditors - the biggest creditor being Arrow ECS.

On the same day, a pre-pack sale of the company's assets was completed with Cloud Transformation, a company set up in January, for £35,000. Cloud Transformation has since changed its name to Centralis Transformation and is run by the same Centralis management team, with different directors and shareholders.

Centralis specialised in the design, build and management of end-user computing, specifically desktop virtualisation. It was one of just a handful of top-level Platinum partners for Citrix.

For the 12 months ending December 2015, Centralis' revenue dropped 19 per cent year on year to £3.9m. Net losses widened 2.4 per cent to £278,003 in the same period.

A report by FRP Advisory, stated: "In recent years the company had been loss making. The company was in a "time to pay" arrangement with HMRC (for arrears of PAYE/NIC) where the amount outstanding was approximately £135k.

"Cash flow had deteriorated to the extent that the company was no longer able to honour the HMRC agreement or make supplier payments and salaries. HMRC had advised that they will be issuing a petition to wind or take other recovery action."

The report, dated 10 August, also claims that a small dividend is expected to be made available for creditors.

Of the £388,000 currently reported to be owed to creditors, distributor Arrow ECS is owed £259,000. Tech Data is also among the creditors and is owed £25,037.21.

Alistair Holt-Thomas of FRP Advisory said: "We've moved from administration to liquidation so we can get ready to pay a dividend to creditors.

"We don't [have any more information on the dividend] at the moment. We've recently sent a report out encouraging creditors who haven't submitted their claim to submit their claim.

"Once we've had all the claims in we will know how much we will need to divide the available funds out among. Until such time I can't estimate what the dividend is going to be."