£11m Wrekin ruby valued at £300,000 by sellers Tamar
The mystery has continued at collapsed engineering firm Wrekin Construction after it emerged a ruby the firm bought for £11 million a year ago was valued on the sellers accounts at just £300,000 a year before.
Wrekin, based in Shifnal, near Telford, was taken into administration just over a week ago. About 24 hours later, administrators at Ernst & Young made the majority of the firm’s hundreds of employees redundant, and said there were “a number of issues” it had identified in the company’s dealings.
It later emerged that the company had issued £11 million worth of shares in exchange for a ruby known as “The Gem of Tanzania”, in a deal done with Derbyshire construction firm Tamar Group.
The accounts for Tamar, which is owned by businessman David Unwin, show a gem worth £300,000 owned by the firm in 2006. Neither the auditors who accepted the value of the gem, whether £300,000 at Tamar or £11 million at Wrekin, would comment on the issue.
A fake advert for the ruby – which is estimated to be the size of a chicken’s egg if it is genuinely worth £11 million – has been put up on online auction site eBay.
Nearly 500 jobs were lost after the collapse of Wrekin, which was prompted by a winding up petition presented to the firm’s bank by more than 20 unpaid contractors.
At the time there was anger expressed at RBS for taking the company into administration, after the firm said it had an order book worth hundreds of millions of pounds, and was still capable of paying off its debts.
The creditors were represented by Darren Davoile, a debt recovery manager with Coventry-based insolvency law specialists Coltman Warner Cranston.
He had represented 20 creditors owed £1.3 million between them when he presented the winding up petition to the Royal Bank of Scotland. He said there had been a “vast” reaction to the collapse of the company, adding: “Every day we are getting correspondence from solicitors asking ‘can we jump on?’”
On Monday hundreds of former Wrekin workers formed a convoy on the way to the firm’s headquarters to protest over the way the collapse had been handled.
Tamar Group took over Wrekin Construction in 2007.
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