The entry to strike off the Abingdon BID (Business Improvement District) company appeared on the 12th November at Companies House … https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/10049701/filing-history.
The Abingdon BID was seen as a way of promoting Abingdon business. Business rate payers paid for it and they petitioned for it to be closed down. That has now happened.
The striking off notice says …
‘You should deal with any of the assets of the company before applying, eg close any bank accounts and transfer any domain names.
When your company is dissolved, all the remaining assets will pass to the Crown (including any bank balances).’
This is a feature of Abingdon. Setting up organisations so that people can sit on committees and it is only an intellectual excercise and does not achieve anything of substance. The South Abingdon Residents group was such like. When it was a real residents group with feet on the ground it achieved quite a lot in the local area but it was only a paper excersise in the end to put forward proposals that would never come about. More committees that do not achieve anything.
A committee: a body that keeps minutes and wastes hours.
Please note I have been the minute-taker on more than one occasion. 😉
This is very worrying not least because the directors of the Bid oversaw took it upon themselves to out source the running of the Biid, which included handing over financial responsibilities to a husband and wife outfit who pretty much laughed all the way to the bank with about £200k’s worth of compulsory collected tax from towns businesses the upshot of that is those businesses have absolutely no tangible evidence the Bid ever existed !
Worse still is the very directors who oversaw this shambles now want to close it down which in doing so will, apart from drawing a line in the sand will stop any chance of business ever recouping any of their lost/missing £200k
I spoke with company house this morning about this application and they confirmed if it is allowed to dissolve it will cut of any conduit and thus hope of business getting its money back, they suggested objecting to the dissolve application on the grounds that significant amounts of funds are still in accounted for !
@Horsesmouth: Excellent information; it will be interesting to see whether those who paid out for apparently very little will be able to mount an effective challenge to the application to dissolve BID. I hope that they succeed in recouping some of their outlay.
Surely the body that voted to impose the failed BID project will be objecting to the application to dissolve it and fighting to retrieve the money taken, with no benefit, from local businesses.
The Abingdon BID team called me in for a meeting at Slade legal few years ago…..they kept me waiting for an age and seemed to have forgotten, who I was or even why they had asked me in at all!?! It was really weird.
When we did finally have chat, they seemed to have little or no knowledge or in my opinion interest in Abingdon.
Sadly this BID was always doomed to fail….
Having moved away from Abingdon, I have seen BID schemes work well in other parts of the country and do a great job in revitalising High Streets. One of the sad aspects of the Abingdon BID is that it pretty much ruins the chances of any future initiative designed to breathe life into the town centre. I hope this is not the case.
Free on street short term parking. That’ll sort it
I think this is awful. Hard up businesses handing over money they can ill afford to do. The money then collected, the collectors of that money are then free to dissolve their business and leg it. Surely this can’t be allowed to happen.